Oral History Interview
with
James D. Phillips
Interview by
Tim Scanlon
11 November 2006
CSHP 0034
Part 3
Colorado Springs History Project
CSHP
Pikes Peak Library District, Special Collections
Copyright 2015
Colorado Springs History Project
The Colorado Springs History Project was conducted between the years 2005-2010 in a joint effort to document and update the history of Colorado Springs from mid-20th century to 2010. This volunteer team included members from the region’s major academic libraries and faculties, as well as the Pikes Peak Library District and the Pioneers Museum. Administered and supervised by the Colorado Springs History Project Committee, the project interviewers consisted of a number of local volunteers.
The oral history portion of The Colorado Springs History Project identified and interviewed individuals who had helped to shape the city of Colorado Springs in various and diverse ways. Subjects were also sought as representative of inhabitants of the Pikes Peak region and could provide insight into the city’s story in the second half of the twentieth century. The interviews reflect the rapid growth of Colorado Springs and touch on business and government relations, religious organizations, the Air Force Academy, Colorado College, and the growth of many important charitable services within the community.
The collection is comprised of 50 tapes, 19 CDs, and 2 DVDs with 32 individual interviews. These interviews are housed in the archives of Pikes Peak Library District’s Special Collections. A complete listing of the interviews is available at the Special Collections reference desk. Transcripts for many of the interviews are available for use.
Digitization
Audio from the Colorado Springs History Project was digitized between 2009 - 2011 and is available for study and use in the Special Collections department.
The Colorado Springs Oral History Project
James D. Phillips
Oral History Interview
CSHP 0034, part 3
Tim Scanlon
11 November 2006
Colorado Springs, Colorado
PHILLIPS: It’s not flashing at me, but I think it’s recording. So, you had identified that, well, we were in a heavy growth period, or just beginning a heavy growth period. That had started when Ray was director. City Council was very anxious to continue that. Growth was good for the city and good for the people in the city.
SCANLON: So this was mostly capitalizing upon the growth following World War II?
PHILLIPS: Right.
SCANLON: With the expansion of Camp Carson and Fort Carson.
PHILLIPS: Well, actually, it was far beyond that. When, I don’t remember when it became Fort Carson. But it was the Air Force Academy that was the big push at this time. As we discussed earlier, Ray Nixon and the Blue River Project, that was to bring the Air Force Academy in up here. We didn’t have enough water on the Peak to take care of everything. So, that push had been pretty successful. The pipeline had been built, the things were in. We were also building the big pipeline over from Homestake Reservoir on the western slope and we were talking to the federal government regarding other water rights that were over there at the Frying Pan, the Arkansas project. The Frying Pan-Arkansas project was under construction, or under review and getting started well, and that took place under Kennedy’s, he came to Pueblo to announce that they were going to start the project. And that was when Ray was still utilities director. All of those things were in motion at that time.
SCANLON: And it was the fact that the community was making progress in providing sufficient water that was a factor in awarding the Air Force Academy to this community?
PHILLIPS: Well, that was done really and accomplished with the Blue River Water project. There were promises made and we built the big reservoir up here on the divide between here and Woodland Park. That would be Rampart Reservoir. And had a pipeline coming down through the canyon from Rampart Reservoir to a water treatment plant. There were two of them up there, small ones, but there was another large one being built in the Air Force Academy, and it was just, well, started, at that time. But we were able to meet any needs the Air Force Academy would have. And so, that was locked in and they were building the Air Force Academy. They didn’t build it for about two years I think when Ray retired.
SCANLON: So, it’s a period of great growth, a great deal of optimism, I presume, on the part of the community and the Chamber of Commerce and Council.
PHILLIPS: The big push was on. We were going to become another big electronics center. In those days, utilities did not belong to the Chamber, but we were sent to discuss things with them often. And then the homebuilders association was very, very strong in Colorado Springs. And yes, everything was dependent on, the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, and the future electronics, that this was going to become the mountain where the electronics were all built rather than California.
SCANLON: And do you recall who some of the figureheads in the homebuilders association may have been? At the time, some of the developers present would have been a guy named John Ceresa, John Bonforte, Bill Smartt was also a developer of that era. Were these individuals involved?
PHILLIPS: I knew all of them. We worked with them. I had worked before as part of wastewater and then when I moved onto the other job, I began working in all of their areas, their development in the community, and trying to keep everything moving forward with each one of the divisions. The wastewater division was building a new wastewater treatment operation, which was the new activated sludge. The water division was busily building the new water treatment plants, finishing up the Rampart Reservoir, the pump station on the Blue River on the, the Homestake project was being completed, all of those water divisions were very busy. The electric department was quite interested in a new power plant, and Ray Nixon and I had worked to get the land down below to build that the Nixon Power plant is on right now, to get that piece of property. And we bought it from the Wrigley Bull operation. Wrigley’s had owned it. They purchased it from the family that was down there, and they owned it and the ranch up above, and we bought those two for a future power plant, but that was all they purchased. They were there. And the gas division was wandering around in a world that CIG (Colorado Interstate Gas) had promised gas that would be available for our great growth push, and I don’t remember the figures, but we were moving more houses than had ever seen, had seen in Colorado Springs before, on a monthly basis. For years we held the highest month of construction in that time frame, right in there. And suddenly, CIG was suddenly having meetings with us. John Frederick was the director of gas, or superintendent of the gas department. I went to the meetings in Ray’s place. Ray was not too excited about John, who kept telling him that “They were not going to service the present.” CIG kept saying, “Oh yes, we will have the service for you, don’t worry about it. Just keep going and hang on.” But they kept having meetings with all their people and us, and telling us how bad the gas supply was becoming in Texas and down in that part of the country where all our gas came from, and Oklahoma.
SCANLON: So, the head of the organization was being positive, but the technical people were identifying that there were problems.
PHILLIPS: Right. And we had pretty good ties with the technical people. Most of them were local residents, and had been for years. And they would come to me because they had known me for years and not to Ray because they were afraid he’d go back to the president of the company and tell them. And they were telling me to get ready because it is going to hit you. And so John Frederick and I were very, very locked in to trying to figure out what we could do to help. We made trips to the northern part of the state where we could buy a gas well and we brought a hundred and forty-four thousand dollar check with us. They drilled 1,200 feet in one day, and if they hit gas, we owned the well and if we didn’t, we were out a hundred and forty-four thousand bucks. John and I were not quite that big of gamblers, we did not want to play that game. We looked at storage facilities, the coal mines in the north where if we got a surge of gas, we could store it and then move it to Colorado Springs. All those things were being reviewed and the rest of it was all moving and everything was really going fast. Smartt, all of those people you mentioned, all had a lot of money tied into the community, and they were really twisting the utilities’ arm to keep up with them. We kept trying to get them to have to pay for what they were getting. We got it in some areas, and in some areas we didn’t, the amount of money we really needed.
SCANLON: So, there were certain standards that had to be met for the installation of utilities. And was there any issue with regard to meeting those standards?
PHILLIPS: Well, in those days, we did not have federal government down our backs with the health departments with wastewater and water. With electric and gas, we did not have any federal rules or regulations of any great penalty side on emissions. That kind of thing. They were just beginning to show up. The problem areas that were to come were just beginning to show up. The wastewater division had been the stepchild for so long in the utilities department, because when I first went to work down there, we collected twenty-five cents a month per house and seventy-five cents for businesses in fees. And poor old John Frederick, he had to make his, when he was down there, by himself, before I got there, they had to put out their own bills every month. And if they didn’t get their bills out, they didn’t get paid. So, wastewater had a tough time. The unit itself had been built in a vegetable patch that was, belonged to the General Palmer had that piece down there. And they ran all the sewer lines down out of this major portion of the center of the city, down on to that little area over there on East Las Vegas (Street) right now, and they raised vegetables and this region and hauled them back out and sold them to the people. But, the lines were not good, but we were starting to build some bigger lines when I left the wastewater division. And we built a thirty inch line down into that country and some others a little earlier than that. Well, I was there what, fifteen years. And during that time, we built a number of larger lines. It also got me into an area that was becoming far more important, I don’t think, than anyone thought it would be, and that was reuse of water. We were having some little problems with droughts again. And the City Council came to Ray and said “What can we do?” Ray turned around to John and I and said “What can we do to get some additional water?” And so John, he knew where the gas department had two old tanks that they had used to make, I think we talked about this earlier, the coal gases for lighting the streetlights downtown and they’d set them aside when electricity became available to them. And so we went down and got those and turned them into the water filtration. And that has grown probably into one of the most important areas that we’re going to see in this community before it’s all over. The Smithsonian, not the Smithsonian, the two big government organizations I got involved with gave us grants, and we did some experimental work that had not been done in the United States with sewage before, and had excellent luck with it. What finally developed was what was going to be in this new plant up north.
SCANLON: So, this was an early example of taking sewage, treating it in some fashion, to generate a certain degree of water quality such that it was non-potable but fairly clean by urban standards.
PHILLIPS: At that time, it was enough. At that time, it was at the same time we were sending people to the moon. And the astronauts had been asked to drink, there they had filtrations systems on some of the spacecraft that would produce drinking water and they were, I guess they wouldn’t use that. They used the water off their batteries, which could have had acids in it that had been corrosive and not good. But I even got the big problem when I gave a speech at a downtown meeting one day and informed the people that someday, they would probably would be drinking their own waste. And I don’t know exactly how it was worded at that time. We had a switchboard, and the next day, after it came out in the newspaper, that was flooded by calls from people that said “Never is that going to happen.” And all this. Now, I got into some hot water over that. Ray thought it was kind of funny in the end. But it really is the beginning of what may be the future. The reuse of water is certainly not unheard of.
SCANLON: Well, it is my understanding that there was a study done and the analysis of the water in the Mississippi. By the time it reached New Orleans, had been used somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to twelve times before it got to New Orleans.
PHILLIPS: Well, we use to have a joke with the people we worked with out of Kansas City, saying that if they didn’t like the water, don’t worry about it. All nine of us enjoyed it before they did.
SCANLON: Ok, well, so it’s a time of great opportunity. The economic engine is thriving at that time. It’s probably the, the era, where growth is regarded as good and beneficial, and we in the community are reaping the benefits of all the growth, the jobs, the housing, we’re expanding, you know, at tremendous strides. It, 1972 was also a period where we were starting to get inflationary pressures in the nation as a whole, and they were concerned about inflation and so, you had mentioned that Mr. Nixon was pressured to step down by the employee retirement association.
PHILLIPS: I was not involved in what was taking place. Yes, I understand that that did happen to him.
SCANLON: Why would they be concerned about that?
PHILLIPS: Well, in those days, PERA (Public Employees Retirement Association) was just getting going good. And they had rules and regulations that still stand today, that at a certain point, they did not want you still working, if you could retire. And the City took those to heart and said he had to leave. And so Ray was retired. They gave him a year’s salary when he retired to make him feel better about it, because he was afraid that he would not have enough money to retire on. Well, the PERA paid well, even in those days. And his salary was certainly not the kind of salaries that I ended up with, or the people that are there today have. It’s a totally different world than both of those. Ray was quite upset, but Ray was also getting pretty old and he was having some problems. I think the City Council I don’t know. In those days, City Councils were behind closed doors except when they were ready to go out in the public.
SCANLON: So, they would announce,
PHILLIPS: All the meetings, all the meetings were held in there. There were some wild fights that went on in those meetings. People screaming at one another. “This is good, and that’s bad.” Because there was not as much joy in this community as you might think about the growth.
The homebuilders were a bunch of bad people that were trying to wipe the community out. Locals who had lived here forever were going to keep it the same little tourist city it had always been. And there were battles, open pitched battles between the two of them. A lot of words thrown around. But they used to go into these meetings and close the door and then the battle was on. And I got to go to most of those with Ray and sit through those.
SCANLON: So, would this, these battles be among Council members?
PHILLIPS: Yes.
SCANLON: Or would members of special interests been a part of these?
PHILLIPS: No, just Council members and staff. They never allowed the outside world in. The homebuilders had a certain group that were for them, and the local keep-it-the-way-it-is people had a group for them, and there was a group for the Chamber (of Commerce). Breaking up nine people into a sixteen person group was kind of tough at times. But they did a pretty good job of attempting to grow. There also were problems. We had council members at that time that some people did not like and didn’t want. And one was Doctor (Fred) Sondermann was considered bad news. He was CC (Colorado College). He was not the right kind of man to have on the Council.
SCANLON: He was a biology professor?
PHILLIPS: He was Jewish. No, he was a history, an economics prof. Very bright man. And get a little further here, in a few minutes, when the gas moratorium took place, he was my salvation during the gas moratorium, as far as the Council was concerned. But, we had all of those things going on and then, I can’t remember the exact date, it should be branded in my mind, but we went into Council meeting and CIG had given Ray a letter before we left the office, and he didn’t let me read it. He just, we walked out and got up to the courthouse and went into the City Hall and went into the meeting room He handed it to me to read there, and there was the thing from CIG stating that they were going to reduce our gas load. We would only handle those people who were living here now and there would be no extra gas. He and I really didn’t have a chance to talk about it, but we kind of went over into a corner and he said “What do you think we do?” and I said “Well, you know the only thing we can do is a moratorium.” Because we discussed these things before, with John and with these other people. And he was saying “I was afraid that was what you were going to say.” So he got up, god love him, and told the City Council that “This is it.” We have no more natural gas and we’re going to have to call a moratorium immediately. There will be no messing around with this. We will set up what we can to help guide people who need things that, builders that were in process at the present moment, and on and on. The whole story. To the City Council. Well, they went swinging through the trees. They were furious. At Ray. They thought it was his fault, and it wasn’t, Ray had no control over it, whatsoever.
SCANLON: So, at this time, natural gas was being used for both heating and for cooking.
PHILLIPS: For residences. And power plants.
SCANLON: And power plants, so there was an industrial aspect to this, also.
PHILLIPS: Yes.
SCANLON: Was there any, was there any reaction to possibly using electric power for heating and cooking, for residences?
PHILLIPS: There was a lot of that thought. But the problem was, at that time, we had some coal burning but not fully coal-burn, available coal. The north plant had been built with a bunkered area to use coal and we put on natural gas. There was great fear by the City Council, we could not go ahead and use coal up there because we were so close to the card place, the people that make all the cards are located. Can’t think what their name is.
SCANLON: Current?
PHILLIPS: Current. Was right across the street. And with the dust coming out of the coal being handled in there. It would get into their printing operation, and destroy their operation, and we’d be sued. So, we couldn’t do that one. Birdsall, that’s Birdsall, the ones down along the creek down there, were both coal and gas. And we attempted, we couldn’t get all we wanted off to get them on coal fast enough to do us any good. And we also needed capacity, also. We did not have enough. That’s why the land had been purchased down below Hanna Ranch. Things were just pretty bleak. There was no available power on the market in those days. Moving power was not like it is today. It was just not done quite the same way. So, there we stood without anything to do, and it was Ray’s, it was two days before Ray left. So, I took over.
SCANLON: And at this point, you had already been identified as,
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes, I had already have been. The announcement had already been made. Some of these I do have some clippings that were kept. A little thing, I don’t know what. From 1900 to 2000. I don’t even know who wrote that. See, there’s things like this, I don’t know. This is the water stuff. And we had also got money from them to build the wastewater treatment plant on Pikes Peak. That was another one of my little projects. I kept the City Council, I kind of think, somewhat fascinated. I just changed some marvelous things, like going to England on city money to look at projects they had going over there in the disposal of sludge where we cooked it and made big blankets out of it. And at the same time, before I moved up, we got into terrible trouble hauling the sludges. John Frederick left, and we were left with all of this sludge that had to be disposed of. Finally we started hauling it to the airport and burying it in trenches out there. And people who lived along the road where we were hauling complained of this horrible odor. Well, these were closed trucks. There was no odor coming off any of the trucks, but there were a lot of them. And we kept hauling all that stuff out.
SCANLON: And the airport was selected just simply because it was away from,
PHILLIPS: It belonged to the City. Where we didn’t get into any arguments with the owners. We tried other lands that were closer, but people didn’t want us in there.
SCANLON: And so, was there any concern about groundwater contamination back in that time?
PHILLIPS: Not particularly.
SCANLON: Of course, the City was not reliant upon groundwater wells.
PHILLIPS: We weren’t relying on anything.
SCANLON: And, inasmuch as Colorado Springs is not located on a major waterway, and is the only Front Range,
PHILLIPS: Or the United States that is this size that isn’t on a major waterway.
SCANLON: There are many other communities that do rely on groundwater.
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes.
SCANLON: Can you share some of the thinking behind Colorado Springs seeking to pipe in water rather than rely on groundwater?
PHILLIPS: Well, it was somewhat of a surprise to everybody, I think, when Ray, me, the first moves to get the, there we go, I think everyone was a little surprised when Ray said he was going to start bringing in trans-mountain diversion water. This had been done for over a hundred years in Colorado. They would move water from the western slope to the northern Colorado area when the big droughts in the 1920’s took place. It started up there. They started moving water across, and those were the first water rights that were moved from the west slope to the east slope. So it had been done. And there were water rights that were floating around at that time. And they were cheap. They seemed very expensive. I think we paid something like twenty-six dollars an acre foot for the Blue River. There was an engineer who had done planning on the project who had purchased the rights and he sold out for this enormous sum of twenty-six dollars an acre foot. But when you are buying ten thousand acre feet, that was a good slug of money. And so, a lot of people griped and moaned about what he was doing with the water. He brought it down, I think we talked about this, where he brought it in and dumped it into Elevenmile Canyon, put a pumping station in Lake George, just out there by Lake George, and pumped it up on the peak. Where he could then pump it on across and get it in into the reservoir on the Rampart Range. Oh, a lot of people thought it was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to us. But, it was water, and it was working. Then came the Homestake. And Homestake was another one where an engineer had filed on those water rights over in there, and he sold, I don’t remember what the price was on that. I was doing other things at that point. In time, I suppose, and didn’t keep track of it. I wasn’t really involved much when that was brought in and there were problems. We drained, or drilled that tunnel, that mad tunnel over there and under the continental divide and had city people who weren’t allowed to go into the, some of the female council members came to the door of the tunnel to go in and the miners said, “They come in and we go out.” Those were still the days when women were not allowed underground. They were bad luck. And so, these were bad times.
SCANLON: But it seems as though that the water rights would have been cheap, particularly compared to the infrastructure necessary to deliver the water.
PHILLIPS: There was nothing that was considered cheap. Everything was too much money. You didn’t have that kind of money. You could not spend that kind. “What are your doing, out there, spending thirty cents a foot for putting pipe in the ground?” There wouldn’t even (indecipherable) at you.
SCANLON: It still would have been considerably more expensive than drilling ground wells locally.
PHILLIPS: Well, the thing was, people did not like groundwater. They didn’t like the idea of groundwater. This community has a major problem with groundwater that most people don’t know anything about, and it’s an iron bacteria called crenoprix. And you get this water in these wells out here, you get that well infected with this bacteria. The water turns red, tastes like iron doo-doo, and stains everything it gets on. Black Forest has a lot of wells that have this, and people, they now have filter systems that they are on, but it still isn’t great water. So, a lot of people who’d live in this community for a long time had drilled wells in the past, had problems with them, couldn’t solve the problems in those days. There had been a surface water operation in the beginning, and then because of the grasshoppers, had changed to the pipelines. The pipelines had frozen, and then they put in deeper pipelines and they worked pretty good. So everybody said, “Okay, you can move water around with pipes.” And so, they didn’t like it but they accepted it. So, we went that way and continued going that way clear through my time. We bought, there’s the Springs’ water rights for five hundred thousand, this was after we purchased the Twin Lakes water. That was when I was deputy city manager and director. I was taking everyone’s job at that point in time. I can’t remember the costs o the water. Oh, it was. I thought maybe there was a price. I don’t remember. We paid a pretty low price for the water coming out of Twin Lakes. We bought one share, while Ray was still here. We bought probably an eighth of it. It had come up for sale by one of the irrigation companies. When I came up with it, ninety percent of it was left to be sold. The last ten percent of it that was there was an irrigation company that didn’t want to sell out and we paid, I think it was about fifty-four dollars an acre foot for it. And it now sells at seventeen thousand dollars an acre foot. So, you know, boy did I get, when I first became the utilities director, I was taken into the doomed back room and I was told “Get water. Continue to get water any time you can get water.” Well, I got them water. And we came up with the bill. I sent to Denver and signed all of the notes for the City to buy that water, came home and was called into the doom room and was told “You damn fool, what have you done? You’ve bankrupted utilities.” And so, I was going from one jump to another. But that’s a little different area of the story. We were working on the gas moratorium. Going back to the gas moratorium, we had a Council that had problems because they didn’t like some of their own members and they were told “We’re going into a moratorium.” The next morning, before we could get the announcement out to the public, one of the City Council members walked in with about eighty-five permits. We had Sondermann, who was the Jewish gentleman, who everybody thought he was out to do. I don’t know what they thought he was going to do. Turn this into a Jewish community or what, because they just gave him a terrible time. Over the gas moratorium, he actually had nothing to do with it. But with me, he went with me to every speech I had to give to homebuilders, angry audiences and everything else. He sat on the stage with me and none of the rest of them would go with me. It’s pretty remarkable. Even the mayor wouldn’t go, and that was Andy Marshall, grand man. But none of them would travel with me.
SCANLON: Was the City Attorney of any assistance at that point?
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes, he was in there smacking his lips, because three days after I became director, also I had five lawsuits filed against me. The smallest one was nine million dollars. And they were filed against me personally. But the City nicely said they would defend me. So, Louie Johnson and his staff were sitting there just licking their lips. They were waiting. This was going to be a good time. My first year, literally, I spent in court more than I did anything else. I remember the year, I still had people working, thank god I had good managers, that were in charge of the divisions and that were willing to work with us and a Council that was a little aghast at what had happened, but were willing to work with us and we held the city together. But my first year in court, I learned far more about the law than I ever wanted to learn. And in the end, we were, we talked to the, in those days, we were under the state rules and regulations regarding utilities. And they were giving us a rough time. Finally, John Frederick and I had been working on a possible solution for a long time and we had looked at air propane plants. And this meant we could bring in one cubic foot of natural gas and had four cubic feet of air and sell five cubic foot of natural gas that would burn in a home furnace. Which was a darn good idea, we thought. But we had one small problem. The United States was in a moratorium regarding gas. But the governor of the state of Colorado had become the energy czar in Washington (John A. Love). And we needed, I think it was a million gallons of propane, I can’t remember the exact figure, but it seems like a million gallons of propane that we would have for a year’s need. And we needed to get that approved. And the only one that could approve it was a Senate hearing committee that was being pushed around by the past governor. And so, Andy had connections, which was great. He called Washington and they got us permission to come and talk to them about getting this gas at a hearing that was coming up. And we had fifteen minutes to explain our position, what we needed and why we needed it, and then they would take five minutes and then they would be back with an answer. Have you ever heard of the Federal Government moving that fast?
SCANLON: Never.
PHILLIPS: Well, I wrote a deal up. Andy and I flew back to Washington, walked into the thing. Andy said “I won’t talk to these people. You give the talk and I’ll help you to answer questions afterward.” Which was great. We got in there and we were early and fifteen minutes, one company got up and took fifteen minutes. Ford Motor Company got up. Forty-five minutes later, they were still talking. Finally, what was the Governor’s name again?
SCANLON: Was it Governor Love?
PHILLIPS: Love. He beat the gavel on the table and said “Gentlemen, get to the point! What do you want? You had fifteen minutes. It’s been forty-five minutes and the City of Colorado Springs is waiting and as far as we’re concerned, it is just as important as you are.” The guy from the Ford Motor Company, he bristled up. You would have thought they had hit him with a stick. And he said “Well, we would appreciate it if Colorado Springs would give us their time. They can come back to a meeting later.” And the Committee, Love said “No, they’ve come a long way to do the same thing you did. They are going to get their time. If they are willing to let you to have another fifteen minutes, then we will then hear them and we are sorry that the other people, all the other people that were waiting behind us. So, we sat there for another fifteen minutes. I got up then and gave our spiel, our problems, that we needed all this stuff. There weren’t questions from the audience at all and then Love hit his gavel and they took their five minutes. Andy and I sat there looking at the seams and lord help us. Because he walked back. Because they had not given Ford an answer whether they were going to get their gas. They were the first ones that had not gotten anything. And he hit the table and said, “Due to the fact that the people from the City of Colorado Springs are polite, follow the rules and regulations that are laid out, and the need is not that massive, it’s approved.” Well, we had a million cubic feet of natural gas we could buy with the approval of the federal government. And we came back home, and John had already started the work towards getting the propane plant started. None of us had even seen one. We didn’t know what they looked like. And then we had to go get a piece of property, and again, we ran head-on into the horrible gas plant that was going to kill all the people who lived out there on Sand Creek. Because we figured the place out on Sand Creek where we could feed back into the main line coming in from CIG and would cover large areas within the city would work best for us. And all the people who lived out there just north of the Air Force. They had not become, well, they still are not part of the City (Cimarron Hills enclave). But boy did they have some nasty groups. And so, there I was again on the stage saying “If we don’t kill you, we’ll send you a check.” That did not excite too many of them. But I had Sondermann riding with me through this whole thing. And finally the County Commissioners agreed this had to be done for the good of the City.
SCANLON: So, was there any particular commissioner that took the lead in that?
PHILLIPS: No. Those days, the County Commissioners and the City fathers got along pretty well. There was very little, we didn’t like them and they didn’t like us, but it was all over money and we had a hell of a lot more than they did, in those days. It wasn’t one of those things. But, that took almost a year, from what I remember, until we really got under construction again. And during that time, everybody was shooting at us and I was in and out of court still, and the whole bit.
SCANLON: And at the same time, you were building the Nixon plant down south?
PHILLIPS: No, they hadn’t started it yet. And we got in though, before a commission meeting, State regulatory commission meeting, for the cost of the permits. What the gas permits were going to cost the people so they could have this whole thing, and it had to be set up so that we could charge as they came in. We were already charging for permits, it was something like twenty-five bucks, which was only just kind of help build the service line into the house. And they asked this question, and they had not said I was going to have to have all this paperwork and everything done. I was sitting there with a matchbook in my pocket with the only thing to write on, and a pen, and so I busily did my mathematics on that matchbook and I missed the decimal point and we paid for the air propane plant in two years. Totally complete, because I missed it by one decimal point. Maybe it was two. But it was the right way for the City. They argued about the price.
SCANLON: So, the decimal point was to the revenue’s advantage?
PHILLIPS: Yes. There are a lot of people that said I did it on purpose. Tell you the truth, I didn’t. It was a total error, because I. Nobody had a slide rule in those days, we didn’t have computers yet, and here you’re dealing with multi-million dollar figures on the back of a match cover. How could you see all of it? But it worked out well. And we were back and running again. Within a short time, we were selling permits. People kind of shake themselves loose. Those who had threatened to have me killed, or kill me, had become almost friends again. Some of them came later and told me that “You saved my, my life when you called that moratorium. I had money borrowed, or was going to borrow money that I couldn’t have paid back.” And on and on. “You really did a marvelous thing for me.” Well, I wasn’t trying for anything like that.
SCANLON: Well, in, to a very large degree, it was a matter of responsibility. You couldn’t honorably be issuing gas permits for structures that couldn’t be serviced.
PHILLIPS: That’s right. We were very tight about that. We wouldn’t give you an electric connection, either. However, we did allow people to put in, in houses that were being built, they put in electric dryers. Where they had always been gas dryers before in their houses and these kinds of things. And we finally were pushing those, because we were starting to see a loosening of the gas for the power plants. And we had also gotten more coal in. And we had gone to work to finish Unit Number Seven. I think that’s the one you were thinking we were building. Ray had Unit Number Seven at the Martin Drake under construction when I became director. And they had run into major troubles. In fact, funny as it seems, there is a lawsuit still filed, pending, against me, again, personally, over that piece of power plant. And the guy pays his fees every year to keep it alive, but has never gone to court with it. I don’t know what he is waiting for.
SCANLON: So, for the purposes of the interview, the Martin Drake plant is the plant downtown
PHILLIPS: On Las Vegas Street.
SCANLON: Then we have the Birdsall plant which is North Nevada Avenue.
PHILLIPS: Right.
SCANLON: And we’ve got the Nixon plant which is south of Fountain.
PHILLIPS: Right. There’s also another big plant down with the Nixon plant that was built after I retired. Well, Phil (Phil Tollefson) was director. It was a total gas operation that I do not even know, I’ve heard that it’s over five hundred megawatts. But they can’t operate it, because it has. The gas that is coming in has fumes coming off it that the health department and the air pollution control people won’t accept. So I know nothing about that. So, if this comes up, you will have to talk to somebody else.
SCANLON: Okay, so the moratorium was not popular, and was dismissed as soon as was responsible?
PHILLIPS: As soon as we were able to pass permits onto the people? The moratorium was gone and we were back in business again. It took them a little while to shake themselves out and get their carpenters back and their land all straightened out and figure out what they were going to do. And to pay those gas fees. They were a little high, they thought. But, they weren’t high at all.
SCANLON: Well, compared to what they had been paying, they were higher.
PHILLIPS: Yes. So, everything kind of came out just right on that, in the end. It was a bad situation. Too bad it ever took place. When they do, it came out right. And again, it was that we had just top notch people working at the utilities. They, we were able to step forward and give you ideas, and talk over ideas. There were a lot of wild ideas that came out. And you tried to find the best one. And whether we got the best one or not, I’ll probably will never know. The ones we got all were very workable and we were able to take them to a conclusion.
SCANLON: So, it’s my understanding that the composition of Council changed once the moratorium was over.
PHILLIPS: Well, the Council, in 1967, I wish I had my dates down where we could go into them. The Council changed in 1967 and the, well, Marshall was still the mayor in 1969. Well, that has to go through 1970. Andy Marshall was 1971. Yes, in 1972-73, the Council did change. And Ochs (Lawrence Ochs) became the mayor.
SCANLON: That would have been Larry Ochs.
PHILLIPS: Larry Ochs was the mayor.
SCANLON: And it’s my understanding that the development industry castigated those who felt like managing growth or limiting growth as being responsible for the hardship in the building industry. Blaming the gas moratorium.
PHILLIPS: There was a lot of this. It had nothing to do with anything, except their mouths running. It gave them something to talk about. After that period of time, the City gathered together with the Chamber of Commerce and the local builders and citizens groups and everything else and asked “How do we put this City back on its feet? And, what do we want it to look like.” And that was when we truly went in to make this Money Mountain, the electronics mountain, I can’t remember the buzzwords used for that. I traveled with the people from the Chamber to go talk to people because one of the major draws the City has always had, since it became what it was, were utilities. The price was right and they were reliable.
SCANLON: Also, as a public entity, you were accountable, you were responsible. If there were errors or mistakes, you couldn’t keep them hidden.
PHILLIPS: Nope, not at all. And so, everybody we talked to that was looking for a place to get out of the valleys in California came rolling in here.
SCANLON: So, Hewlett Packard was an early industry that came in here.
PHILLIPS: Hewlett Packard was here when I became director. It was the first one that had arrived. And it had done so well that others were willing to come.
SCANLON: And David Packard was a CC (Colorado College) grad, I believe.
PHILLIPS: Yes, he lived in Pueblo. They started their operation in a garage in Pueblo and moved from Pueblo to Colorado Springs.
SCANLON: Okay, so Colorado Springs is back in relatively good shape. It’s thriving, it’s starting to expand. Not just in terms of industry and electronics. Its tourism industry is starting to take off again. It started to become known as a center for education with CC and we had other small schools. Blair College was here for many years. There’s nursing schools and whatnot. So it seems we returned to an even keel.
PHILLIPS: Well, we were certainly outgrowing everything. We had our medical systems. We had Penrose Hospital, which at that time was not called Penrose. It was called,
SCANLON: It was Glockner.
PHILLIPS: Glockner became Penrose. And then we had Memorial, which was a City hospital. Which has always been one of those interesting things. I don’t even know all the answers to and was never able to get involved with them, even when I was acting city manager. They were very touchy about me talking about certain things. But there was some confusion and need they felt for an expansion, of medical needs, within the community. And it was a growing community that needed to grow with it. The utilities department then had to do something about the sludge. The federal government had finally moved in and said “Do something and do it now.” So, we built the big sludge operation down at the Nixon power plant. They were built almost simultaneously. The Nixon power plant was almost up. In the meantime also, the Frying Pan Arkansas project had come into being. From the reservoir, pumping water north to all of us. And I was president of that organization the whole time. From the time it started until I retired. And I fought the federal government tooth and toenails on that baby. Boy, they tried to screw us, but, terribly.
SCANLON: For what purpose?
PHILLIPS: Money. We still don’t own it. We will never own it. No matter how much we pay, we’ll never own it. The federal government set up a contract, but I don’t understand why the City ever signed it. It was done long before my time. And I think everybody thought the federal government would be fair about it. But, you know some things. They didn’t think we checked the bills, I guess. But the bills started coming into the valley associates down there, where we had Fountain and Widefield, and all these people who had little dibs and daubs of the Frying Pan Arkansas project, and the bills would come in and normally we just had to pay those, and kick them on down the line. Nobody looked at them, but then I started looking at them. And suddenly I was finding that we were paying for parking four hundred trailers in Tennessee. And we were paying for things going on in northern California and in Oregon and in Washington D.C. even. Nice big chunks of bill. One hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar, two hundred thousand dollar, this kind of thing added to the bill. Well, I kind of had problems with them when they first billed it because they had built a pipeline where they did build it and for years, I don’t know whether you remember it or if you’re too young, when the Colorado Springs Highway, I-25, going south had slick and slide area where a hill up above would slide right onto the highway and block it.
SCANLON: I had not heard that.
PHILLIPS: That whole area has got a slick and slide plane on it that the. It used to move down into the creek bed all the time and they had to just dig it out again, build another highway. And when they said they were going to build the pipeline where they were building it, I raised all kinds of hell saying “No, you can’t do that. The pipeline would slide down the hill. You cannot do this.” Well, I was informed that they were building pipelines when I was digging holes in my back yard in Victor, and to get out of their way. Well, they did that three times and it slid down the hill and it cost them three million bucks. But, all those kinds of things were going on. The battle with the federal government was not good. It’s not good today. I don’t know where the city is going to come out on that thing, but I still have a lot of friends in the engineering groups and the federal government who were with the group that said to me “Get out of our way,” who came later and apologized. And said “If we had listened, we certainly could have saved everybody some money and things.” They still call me from time to time to see how things are going, and they are still tied to the federal government. They are not working for them, but they are tied, and they give me very disturbing news at times about the whole project. But that’s neither here nor there. I don’t know if it is true or what’s going on, so it really doesn’t matter. But, we had a whole world going at that time, and they still do. The utilities is a major component of this community.
SCANLON: Well, it’s very unusual for a community to own four major utilities. Gas and electric are uncommon.
PHILLIPS: At one time, were, I think, eight of us. A bigger one than ourselves was Cincinnati, Ohio. They owned all four utilities. I don’t know where it is today.
SCANLON: Okay, another major event that utilities was involved with was the southwest annexation. It was what, the Southern Interurban Company was providing utilities for the southwest area?
PHILLIPS: Well, there was a water treatment operation. I don’t remember exactly what their names were, or they changed their names. It was Broadmoor Water that came out of Rosemont (reservoir) up on the top of the hill. It was certainly sufficient. They drilled a tunnel up there so they could get more water off the top. And I worked on that tunnel as a breast tender one spring when I got out of school. I got to see the sides of the tunnel you see the hard way. Pushing the iron. But the Broadmoor kept changing these little names of these. You had the water and sanitation district that were in Cheyenne Canyon. Run by a gentleman by the name of Jim Conley. Suddenly it was split up. Jim had nothing but the wastewater, and another guy that, I can’t remember his name, which was the Skyway something water company. On and on and on. There were all of these little water companies in those two reservoirs sitting up on top of the hill over there where we were going to build a water treatment plant. And that was in the later portions of my career. The Broadmoor wanted out, but they didn’t want out by being annexed. And it had nothing to do. The annexation was a political fight among politicians. By that time, Bob Isaac was the mayor. And it was his decision that we were no longer going to be the footstep for the Broadmoor. That everything they wanted, we supplied for them, and then they turned around and slapped us every time we asked them for something or wanted to do something. And there had been some fights about location of things, and votes and who did this and who did that, and on and on and on and on. A lot of it. And I stayed out of the way. The utilities directors don’t belong on those fights. So, I did finally get sucked in when we met in the chambers down there where the county had built their new building downtown and they had that big auditorium. We held the meeting down there where the decision was made by the City of Colorado Springs Council, sitting up there on the stage, and the people against it out there in the audience, and those of us who were going to be fed to the crocodiles, and there were (indecipherable) being fed to the microphone from time to time. We went through the whole, we were set up to do it and do it right, and we just showed them that if they wanted to survive in the water area, that they had to go with us. We were the only ones that could get water higher enough to serve that community and in quantities that were usable. And we drew X’s on a map showing where we would and wouldn’t serve. This was done with Isaac standing over me and with me with a pen in my hand saying “I don’t want to do this Bob, I’ve never seen this map before. And I know where I am, but I don’t know if this is where I want to put a pumping station.” “Mark it.” So, we did. Well, thank god that map got lost, but there were a lot of arguments for many years where pumping stations belonged and the City said they would supply. It was kind of funny. Most of it was a political game, and utilities just happened to be in there because we had the major, we already served them electricity. But they had their own wastewater. We served them gas. It was just kind of a hodge-podge of things.
SCANLON: So, there were policies at that time relating to the provision of services outside of city limits.
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes.
SCANLON: We could serve them.
PHILLIPS: We charged them higher rates.
SCANLON: So there was a premium. And presumably, that type of arrangement was what, the powers that be in the Broadmoor area would have preferred. Maybe not paying the premium, but rather than annexation, but just being serviced by utilities.
PHILLIPS: They didn’t want to be part of Colorado Springs. They were the Broadmoor. And it was more on that, really, that disliking the politicians and everybody else. The fact that they were the Broadmoor and we were the peons. Now, I’m sure there were far deeper political things going on that I was not aware of. But I didn’t even try to find them because I had enough troubles of my own during those times too. So, we moved forward with that, we annexed the Broadmoor area, and strangely enough, there’s parts of that annexation, excuse me, that have never been carried out.
(Digital recording interrupted.)
SCANLON: Okay, we were taking about the Broadmoor and variable rates for the provision of services. And some of that was regulated by the state?
PHILLIPS: Gas and electric rates were taken care of by the Public Utilities Commission of the State of Colorado. They set the rates, and they allowed us certain privileges of higher rates for outside of our service area. But it was all inside of our service area, or you would have had other power companies and others moving in. Those were the days of expansion. And we had the REA’s (Rural Electric Areas) east of us that would have loved to have sweep through to Nevada Avenue. And were willing to do all sorts of goody things for everybody to do that. That’s Nevada Avenue was, well, up north, there was no problem. They would have taken it. They got part of that, in the end, finally. But, a lot of competition beginning to form.
SCANLON: And at that point, everything was so highly regulated, but differential regulation was coming.
PHILLIPS: Yes.
SCANLON: Not so much deregulation, but differential regulation.
PHILLIPS: Interestingly enough, Colorado Springs, I kind of pushed the levers and kind of got us out from underneath the Public Utilities Commission of the State of Colorado. We made certain commitments at that time that we would not charge beyond the rates that were being established for other communities and those kinds of things by the Commission, unless we could show need. But they didn’t want to come down here for hearings any more than we wanted to go up there.
SCANLON: So, this was roughly what, in the 1970’s?
PHILLIPS: No, this was later than the 1970’s. This was the mid-80’s.
SCANLON: Okay, that’s close enough. Let’s see. We skipped over a couple of things I’m curious about as to whether there was any effect. At one point when Valley Hi Golf Course was built, was that to be serviced with non-potable water, or back then, was that just drinking water?
PHILLIPS: They had a few wells. Most of them was drinking water. Non-potable water came much later. That was when I was director.
SCANLON: So, what was proposed when it became a municipal golf course.
PHILLIPS: It is.
SCANLON: It is now, but it was not originally, was it?
PHILLIPS: Oh no, it was a private club.
SCANLON: So, to your knowledge, was there a great deal of controversy when that was proposed to become a public course?
PHILLIPS: Great battle of the people who said we were saving, lining the country club’s pockets, and all this kinds of thing. Again, another area that I did not stick my nose into. I didn’t feel it was my problem. It was a utility problem, because at that time there was plenty of water. They had what they wanted.
SCANLON: Let’s see, probably really, a lot earlier than these problems, the Chidlaw Building came in. At one point, that was called Pentagon West, just because of its size. And it was being built for the expansion of the Air Force. Were there any noteworthy problems associated with that building?
PHILLIPS: Well, actually, the only wild one was a sewer line. And for some reason, they were concerned about the possibility of someone pushing explosives up the sewer line and blowing up the building. And so, we had a sewer line that went by them, and it was about twelve feet deep and they had some basements in that thing. I don’t know if you ever have been in that building, I don’t know if they still exist today, but they had some basements that were pretty deep, and they were worried that somebody was going to blow them up. And so they put the sewer line in, and out in Union Boulevard is a lift station that has to lift the sewage about thirty-five feet to get it up into the twenty foot deep sewer line that goes through there. It was a mess. We had plenty of power for them, and all the other things. The major thing we had with that was just, it was kind of surprised to get it in a residential district, that kind of thing. But we handled it alright. The divisions again did what they had to do and carried it out.
SCANLON: There has been recent controversy over wastewater spills affecting Pueblo, but this is not a new occurrence.
PHILLIPS: Not at all. Wastewater spills have taken place throughout the years and in fact, the district attorney at one time was going to put me away, deep, dark in the penitentiary, because of a spill. I was director of utilities. Had not been in the wastewater plant to work or take care of the people or anything else for probably five or ten years, I guess. Again, I wish I had done a dating thing on this. But they had some problems in wastewater division with a spill. And as they began to investigate, they began to. The district attorney had decided he wanted to be the district attorney for the state of Colorado. And he started the whole thing out with an investigation of the City of Colorado Springs and the destruction of the block between the utilities building where the big garages are all built and the courthouse right now. Those were all military bars and it was kind of a rough area and on down over the hill, going out to the black nightclub that was there.
SCANLON: The Cotton Club.
PHILLIPS: The Cotton Club. But that whole area of Colorado Avenue, on the south side, were cold girls and hot beer and things like this were the signs all along there. Well, there were a couple of pool halls in there that had pool tables. And they had brought in city employees who were working for some federal organization that was taking care of this demolition and everything else. And the pool tables somehow got removed and were sold. And the employees supposedly had pocketed the money. I do not know any more than that kind of thing. But, the district attorney at that point, what the hell was his name, I’ll think of it here in a second. But he said that’s a pretty good idea, he got a lot of headlines out of that baby. And it was coming time to run for attorney general of the state of Colorado. So he bound himself up and he went into this wastewater problem.
SCANLON: Was this, perchance Russell?
PHILLIPS: Russell (Robert Russell), yeah.
SCANLON: Was it Bob Russell?
PHILLIPS: Bob Russell. So Bob decided he was going to climb on my back and become a politician by destroying me. So he brought in two or three investigators he sent down to the wastewater division. And one of these guys, I don’t know, he was mad at the other people who worked down there. And I guess he was mad at me for some reason from years past. He’d worked down there. He told the, one of these people from the district attorney, that I’d come down there at midnight one night and opened a big valve to dump all this sludge into the creek.
SCANLON: You personally?
PHILLIPS: I personally. Totally, completely ridiculous. Wouldn’t have done it in the first place, but in the second place, I wouldn’t have done anything like that anyway. I don’t even know I was sure I knew where that valve was. But I had gone down there with the newspapers and showed them a valve going out from a pit into the creek that was supposed to be capped, and it was not. They had them dry up the creek and found that thing was sticking out there. Well, that thing led to me being charged with, god, oh, I know what it was. It was finally rather strange, because they charged me with the same thing that is on the bottom of your income tax that you send in every year, and mine and everybody else’s. If you sign this and certain things are untrue, that you are liable for incarceration, et cetera, et cetera. There’s been one person in the United States that’s ever been held under that charge. And I was number two that’s come up.
SCANLON: So you were actually indicted?
PHILLIPS: Oh yes, I was indicted by a grand jury. And when I walked in and the grand jury had four people sitting on it that had been in battles with the city over things. And I was involved because I was part of it. They didn’t want. There was a lot of growth up here in the north that they were teed off about. Somehow they had gotten on that jury, and I thought “You’re going down the tubes, buddy, because those people are going to vote you out.” Because I had told some of them it was none of your business what was happening twelve blocks away from their house. I was getting older and cantankerous in those days. But, they put this all together and they also had, I think there were fifteen or twenty employees at the wastewater division that they were going to send to the pen, under the same thing. And I appeared before a grand jury and I had to testify and swear that I would never tell anybody what happened, and et cetera, cetera, cetera. And they finished grilling me at two o’clock in the morning. Which was a little strange, anyway. This is not done normally. But I had good attorneys, which you did not have attorneys in the room with you in those days.
SCANLON: I think you still don’t.
PHILLIPS: Oh yes, you can have your attorneys.
SCANLON: Going into the grand jury?
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes. And I have to keep track of those things, because you never know when somebody is going to crawl out from under a rock and say “What did he do twenty-five years ago.” So, they took me to court three times to indict me. And three times I refused to testify in any way, shape or form, and the judge just shook his head and said “We’ll try again.” Three times, and the third time, I was excused with an apology. I don’t know exactly what happened, except that they found out that what had supposedly taken place, did not. But going back to where we really should be on this, and that was discharges, there were a lot of them that took place. Not as many or as big as they’ve had here lately. We didn’t have the stream crossings that came later in my career, after I was utilities, or, wastewater division director. I built some of those big crossings. Sand Creek and the one that washed out, that caused all the problems for them before, that was built when I was utilities director, probably in my fourth or fifth year. And it was a hell of a, it had a concrete enclosure over it that was half the size of this room. And we dug so deep into Sand Creek that we figured that sand would never wash out that deep. Well, it did, and it ripped that thing out, and that’s when they got that big dump. No one had ever said anything about these before. We would go tell the state health department and they would come out and look at them, and they would blubber, blubber, blubber. And then the federal government came in and suddenly they were talking about you should be fined for this and fined for that. I don’t think, when I was utilities director, that the wastewater division was ever fined for anything. They were yelled at a number of times. Pueblo has been dumping forever. I went down. One of the first things John Frederick did was to take me to Pueblo wastewater treatment plant as a lesson as to how not to run a wastewater treatment plant. And we went down there, and I’ll never forget it. They had these big boilers that they heat the sludge in to go to the digesters and John was pointing to this thing and he banged on the side and his thumb went right through the side of the boiler because it was so thin and rotten. He was so embarrassed. I tried not to laugh, because it was kind of funny. But we had great, when I was there, I had great relations with Pueblo, their water, they have a water company that they work with. It belongs, I guess, to the city. I never quite understood how this all worked. But they paid big slugs of money into the City Council. And we had good relationships. Every thirty days I had a meeting with their City Council. We put on a dinner down there for them and then they would put on a dinner up here for us and back and forth, back and forth, and we always kept up with one another. I had the City Councils coming to those. We kept them talking to one another. And then they gave all of that up.
SCANLON: When was that?
PHILLIPS: When Phil (Phil Tollefson) became the director. He didn’t feel he had to do that. He went, he didn’t take his people, and he didn’t take the City Council, from what I understand. Now, I don’t know that much about it. I again never dealt into what he did and he didn’t do.
SCANLON: It occurred after you had left. When you were utilities director, up until 1985, there was, the city manager at least for a long time was a gentleman named George Fellows.
PHILLIPS: Yes. Fantastic man. And you should talk to him.
SCANLON: He’ll be the one I interview next. But it’s my understanding he was a civil engineer and he had an understanding of utilities?
PHILLIPS: George had a degree in city management and in engineering. He had been the city manager in Pueblo for, I don’t know how many years, before he moved up here, and he had been city manager someplace else. And yes, he had an understanding, but he never, in all the time I was there, George never, hardly gave me a halfway order to do anything. I was there to run it, and I damn well ran it. The only problem I ever had with George is that as he went along later and he didn’t want to be the bad guy. I got sucked in on some things. The firing of the park department manager who had torn his girlfriend’s door off of her apartment, and he had to be fired and George wouldn’t do it. He called me in and he said “You have got to do it. He doesn’t work for you, and therefore we won’t get sued if you take him in and listen to him, and figure out whether he should be fired or not.” And all this kind of stuff. And I ended up firing a couple of people that he didn’t want to. But George was one of the finest city managers you are ever going to meet. He’s the only city manager I’ve been around. I have seen other city managers and they were not city managers.
SCANLON: Other people held the position and title but not fitting the role?
PHILLIPS: They did not understand how to make a city operate. We had some fine city managers in our time. I knew Mosley (John Mosley) only from reading about him. And Blunt, and Kenneth Clark. John Biery, I worked under him as the city manager, and he was very good. And George Fellows was next. And he had been there for, I don’t know how many years George was city manager, but quite a few.
SCANLON: I think it was nineteen, because I arrived in February of 1985 and I think he stepped down in May of 1985.
PHILLIPS: Yes. But he was just the city manager’s city manager. And he did not give me too many problems, any of the time I was there.
SCANLON: Then, following Mr. Fellows stepping down, there was a nationwide search and a gentleman named Larry Blick was appointed city manager. There was some controversy, it was not a unanimous decision, and Mr. Blick served a short period of time.
PHILLIPS: Yes. He served, I don’t know, about maybe two years? Or was it that long?
SCANLON: I don’t know that it was that long.
PHILLIPS: They got involved with the park department and the Ski Broadmoor. And Larry was quite excited about it. A man from back east, or wherever he’d came from.
SCANLON: Florida.
PHILLIPS: Florida, I guess. The south. He didn’t know anything about ski areas. And you know that, snow down here was kind of a unique situation, it doesn’t happen very often. And the park department manager was a good talker. He was a nice guy.
SCANLON: His name was Larry Shenk.
PHILLIPS: Yes. Larry was a nice guy and he did bits of good things for the park department. But he got into the Broadmoor, what do you call it, I don’t know, I’m not going to say this because I won’t on tape. But there were some problems far beyond personnel problems out there, that had to be cleaned up. Or we would have had to bring in much heavier action than what took place. But he was blowing money left and right and City Council was furious and they kept telling him to slow down and he just kept going full blast. He bought this snowmaking equipment off Pikes Peak, hauled it down here, set it up, started making snow. You can blow the chemical all you want out the side of the mountain, but if there isn’t the cold, things to make the chemical go, you didn’t get snow. And he was always going to be open by Thanksgiving day every year and it didn’t work even when he did have snow blowing equipment. But he just went on and on, and finally the City told Blick to stop him and get him over and Blick, more or less, didn’t have the gumption or whatever it took to stop him. So, I was brought in. And I was told by the City Council that they didn’t have time to go find another manager and they needed an acting manager for about three months, and would I do it? Well, as the friendly old greybeard, I said “Sure, I’ll be glad to do that for all of you neophytes who were just sitting on the city council.” And Bob Isaac was still the mayor. And it was rather interesting, because I was there a lot longer than three months. And they got, they were great fights. They wanted me to apply for the city manager’s job, and I told them I did not want it. It was not my cup of tea. And they forced me to apply and I really did very little to help myself along. But Mrs. Makepeace wanted a city manager who had a city management background or degree. And she wouldn’t take anybody else. And so they brought in, I can’t think what his name was either. He was from Arizona.
SCANLON: Roy Pederson.
PHILLIPS: Roy Pederson, who got fired from stealing money from the Arizona government or something, I don’t know.
SCANLON: Well, it was also, we never believed Mr. Pederson ever moved to Colorado Springs.
PHILLIPS: Oh he did, he lived up north right off Woodman Road, over there where the toadstool rocks are. He had a house up there that he rented and he threw parties up there like you wouldn’t believe.
SCANLON: Yes, well, there is a difference between occupying and residing. We never knew he actually moved here.
PHILLIPS: He never did. He knew that this old boy down there who was going to retire and he needed an interim job. And so he came here to do it. And he did a job on us. He changed a lot of rules and regulations that should never have been touched. And he got some council people to go along with him because he was the fair haired boy. And on and on and on. When he left, I guess it was Dick Zickefoose.
SCANLON: Now Zickefoose had been the department head in charge of personnel.
PHILLIPS: Yes, he was in charge of personnel. There was no such thing as a department. There was Zickefoose and his minions.
SCANLON: Which seemed a little odd that somebody from that background, you know. If there had been an insistence upon somebody with a city management background and degree, then turning to this gentleman seemed odd to us in the city.
PHILLIPS: It seemed odd to all of us. But the city was in such throes over not having a city manager that, you know, I knew of things that were going on and that even as acting city manager, I would not have acted upon because there would have been major problems. I had already gone through a strike in the utilities, and some other things that I just didn’t need that. And I was still trying to run a utilities department and at the same time, we were trying to take in that huge annexation east.
SCANLON: The Banning Lewis annexation.
PHILLIPS: The Banning Lewis annexation. Which the attorney, the city attorney, Jim Colvin, should be given a medal and a steel helmet and a tank for the rest of his life, because through his drive and my work with him, controlling and trying to stay out of Bob Isaac’s way, and Bob would die if he could hear me saying this, we made them sign that agreement. They are going to pay for now. And we finished up at three o’clock in the morning and finally got their signatures.
We had gone all night long and all day.
SCANLON: And this was negotiations with representatives of.
PHILLIPS: And attorneys and old Jabba the Hut. That was the guy who owned, who was trying to do it. I considered him Jabba the Hut because he invited myself and two of my managers over to a meeting in his office penthouse, and we walked in and there was this huge table and there was a couch-like thing at the far end, and we walked into the room and nobody was there. And then we heard this voice say “Oh, come on up closer.” And a light kind of came on, and here he is, like a Roman emperor, or Jabba the Hut. I don’t know whether you have watched those. Lying on his couch, big fat slob, saying to us “I’m here to help you people understand what real business is like.” Well, he and I and the mayor had already had it out because the mayor had said to me certain things, and I said “That man’s a four flusher.” And he said “You can’t call him that, you don’t know this.” This was about the time he had taken the Broadmoor’s center over there and filled it full of sand for his kid’s bar mitzvah. And so the mayor said, “Well, you can’t say things like that about him, Jim. You just got to be careful or you are going to get canned over this whole thing.” and I said “Well, fine, you are just going to have to can me Bob, because that guy is a four flusher and he’s out to get us.” So I was put on the no-no list. And by Bob. He was really teed off at me. But we made him sign. And my appendix broke about an hour and a half later and I ended up in the hospital. I was having major problems with the doctor that kept telling me it was my gall bladder. I almost didn’t make it.
SCANLON: No kidding. A burst appendix is serious, even today. So you were closely involved with Jim Colvin in the Banning Lewis annexation and presumably a lot of your concern was the adequate provision of infrastructure to service the housing. It’s no different from what was confronting you at the beginning of your career.
PHILLIPS: No, it was totally different.
SCANLON: How so?
PHILLIPS: We had control when I first came in by not having a line available. And the only way you could get a line would be to pay portions or all of it to get it to where you were going. What he wanted to do out there was he wanted to develop the lines, all the utilities, the roads, bridges, whatever, all done before he started building houses. And any place on that piece of property people wanted to build, they could build. And somehow we were to get that to them and he would pay for it. Says here in fine print. But we never were able to get that in writing until we got this thing put together that said, “Design the whole damn thing, build it any way you want to build it, but you are going to pay for every stick that takes place and every cost we come up with.” And he didn’t like that.
SCANLON: So was that, was that a significant change in policy or was that a continuation?
PHILLIPS: See, before, when I said a sewer line was underground, we financed, signed a contract with the developer to put the sewer line in the ground. And the costs of it was charged to the contractor. And then as we made connections, that money was then sent back to the contractor. He got his money back, but we didn’t move unless he was willing to pay for the whole thing and would sign a contract.
SCANLON: So he would have to front the costs and get reimbursement over time.
PHILLIPS: Water was not quite the same way. They charged differently on water, to get their money back. Electric and gas, under the rules and regulations of the state of Colorado, we had to expand as the system, as we saw it in the right way so it wasn’t hurting other people. And that made it easy to keep those two under control. We also had connection fees, and that kind of thing. But we were doing an awful lot of undergrounding by then.
SCANLON: So Aries (Frank Aries) wanted, basically, city utilities to front-end the costs of the construction of infrastructure.
PHILLIPS: That’s right.
SCANLON: And then he would choose to pay us back as, according to the contract.
PHILLIPS: Yes. And he could build any place on the property he wanted to. We would have had miles and miles of pipeline under the ground that might not be used for years.
SCANLON: And it starts to deteriorate from the moment you build it.
PHILLIPS: That’s right. So that one was one of the biggest hits we made. And as I say, Jim Colvin was the only thing that. There will be people that tell you that Bob made it go, but Bob didn’t make that. That’s one, and I love old Bob, he’s a grand man to work with. But that’s one he did not. He was sold hook, line and sinker.
SCANLON: Well, it was also an era where money was flowing and the savings and loans were providing funding such that it triggered the collapse.
PHILLIPS: Well, the money that was going in this thing was being taken from a gambler out of Arizona and Bob was well aware of this. And we all were scared to death that he was going to walk in there some day and say “Well, you guys have taken such and such from me and I want. You know, who do you know is going to do what.” Those kinds of people. We hadn’t dealt with people like that before. He was probably the biggest four flusher we had ever run into in any of them
SCANLON: Looking back over your career at utilities, it seemed as though you were not interested in change for the sake of change. There was a continuity from the decades such that there were no significant internal changes that are noteworthy. It was almost as if professionalism and commitment to your job was more important than the management fad of the day.
PHILLIPS: That’s true. I came up through Ray and George and I was aligned to a situation that said from past history, what should the future be? And if you could get a future that looked good, you better shoot for it. You take off on a new bent, now the non-potable water thing was a total new bent, but it did not mean a thing to anybody except that if it ever really happens. That was something we should know about, because if you can take care of it, it would take care of other problems we had. But that’s the way we worked. The water treatment plants, the purchase of the Twin Lakes water, the water that we didn’t quite finish up on. I went back in and bought all of it. And ended up, we own it today and we can move most of it, but we can’t move all of it. We own Twin Lakes. Before Ray had gotten a hold of it, we owned the lakes. And Ray sold it to the federal government, with the Council’s approval, so we did not have to take care of the dam.
SCANLON: Twin Lakes also has an interesting element with an electric generation item that depends upon the differential between rates of peak and non-peak hours to pay for itself. Whose idea was that?
PHILLIPS: That was the federal government. This was a standard situation with them. You had to pump the water uphill and run it back down to get the power out of this thing. And so if it was in peak hours, you had to pay a higher price than you did on non-peak hours to pump the water up, so you could run it down so you could sell it at the higher prices and peak hours and it goes on and on and on. Yes, that’s feds.
SCANLON: But it seems the capital investment to put that into place would take decades to amortize the costs.
PHILLIPS: The federal government doesn’t worry about that. The federal government, that plant, have you ever been to it?
SCANLON: Yes.
PHILLIPS: And it is underground, as you know. They wanted to build it up along the shore in the beginning. We wanted them to build it up along the shore. It would have been a grand building. It’s sticking out there so far as those people like myself that likes power plants. But everyone else wanted it buried. The money they spent on that thing was ridiculous. It’s only a hundred megawatts, two-fifty watt operation units.
SCANLON: It’s very small. It makes a nice visitor’s center.
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes. We always used to have a marvelous time taking people down through that when we had those doors. We’d lose them, but.
SCANLON: Did you ever, the municipal utilities building sits just north of the city administration building on South Nevada Avenue. Had you ever officed in there?
PHILLIPS: You mean 18 South Nevada? Oh, yes. I was in Ray’s office probably for five years. For three years afterwards, we didn’t build the building on the corner (city administration building). We had to condemn all the properties which we were condemned for. Let’s see, we got rid of a hotel that had a very nefarious reputation.
SCANLON: That was the Rex?
PHILLIPS: Yes. It was sold by the hour. Then there was a bar on the corner that was not worth much, but you would think we were taking away part of the historical remnants of the city of Colorado Springs before we could get it all done. Also, there was always the feeling that there wasn’t enough money. We just didn’t have enough money to have the offices where we needed them, that kind of thing. And we finally got it and we built it (city administration building). And it was to be occupied by a minimum of seventy-five percent utilities employees and twenty-five percent others, which meant general city. Today it’s one hundred percent general city, I guess. I don’t know how the bond even came out. I’m sure it was all worked out.
SCANLON: Oh, you mean for the City Administration Building.
PHILLIPS: Yes. Eighteen South Nevada was a fire station.
SCANLON: Correct. That was the original fire station number one.
PHILLIPS: Yes, and it was a grand old building. And we, John Frederick, became my assistant finally, and we had redone it so that it met the hysterical rules of the community. Historic, I’m sorry. And we found things, you know, clocks embedded in the wall, marble clocks embedded in the wall, and all these things. It was fun to even do that one. We tied it then to the other building. I guess now they are trying to sell it.
SCANLON: It has been sold.
PHILLIPS: It has been sold. What’s going into it, do you know?
SCANLON: It’s, well, there’s a firm called Land Development Company, I believe, and they are looking at it just an investment, selling it to somebody else. Maybe turn it into a restaurant.
PHILLIPS: Well, it will make a nice one.
SCANLON: Well, it’s really kind of interesting. It has been identified as an art deco building, perhaps the best in downtown.
PHILLIPS: One of the few ever built in this part of the country with that art deco, gothic outside on it.
SCANLON: And legend has it that the large windows fronting on the sidewalk were used to display modern electric conveniences.
PHILLIPS: Yes, this was one of the, utility companies in Colorado, public service company, started all that, I imagine. I don’t know when they started putting. But they sold washing machines and washers and things And this was one of the things that the early people may have wanted to do in that building. But never really had enough room. They had that big counter, as you came in. And on the other side was the cage.
SCANLON: And you had the stairway going up to the mezzanine level. Then the building was expanded later on, going all the way back to the alley.
PHILLIPS: Well, there were two expansions. Most people don’t know about it. One time they expanded the upper floors and left a parking lot underneath. And then I needed more room for the people who were doing the billings and those kind of things, and I moved the parking garage out of there and built that other floor down there. And it kept us going for a little while longer, because, I tell you, squeezing a building out of that city council was well, that was like getting gold out of a squeezy fish. It was just not done. When we built the big warehouse up north, I was not in the management section. I was still in the wastewater department, but John Frederick me up to them to help design on that building.
SCANLON: So this was the service center on Fontanero?
PHILLIPS: The service center off Fontanero. And you‘d have thought we’d been given another large kingdom of modern wonderful buildings, and it was a tin structure that could have been blown over by a halfway wind. And still is, as far as I know.
SCANLON: Oh yes, it hasn’t changed.
PHILLIPS: I don’t know how Phil got into the building business. I built, let’s see, the office downtown, then the building up at the north power plant, and that was built for security reasons where it is, and everything else, or we’d put it out in the world where everyone could see it.
SCANLON: Yes, I was kind of curious because the power plant is a handsome building and that modern office building kind of detracts from it.
PHILLIPS: Well, yes, it does. We were going to put it some other places. Then I had gone, put on the federal disaster committee out of Washington D.C., and I was given things about power plants and how they could be attacked and all these things. And we talked it all over and decided that that building should not be away from where we could take care of it. So we put it in there. The manager at that time hated where we put it. I didn’t like it because it is a pretty building. They’re both pretty buildings. But, it’s where it belongs. Because it can be taken care of rather quickly, and a lot of people don’t even notice it there. But it is stacked full of the control of this system.
SCANLON: The city utilities also moved into an old, well, it wasn’t old building, it was a finance building over at Cascade and Colorado. Was that under your tenure also?
PHILLIPS: Yes.
SCANLON: And that was just available space.
PHILLIPS: It was a space. We were in the bank buildings, up on the corner of Bijou and Tejon, above. In fact, I tried to buy the bank up there when the Colorado Springs National (Bank) closed.
SCANLON: Right, that’s the old Hagerman Block.
PHILLIPS: Yes. We were in, the electric division was in the upper floors over the shoe store that was in there. And I tried to buy that other building and they wouldn’t sell it to me. Or, they sold it to somebody else. And about six months later, it came back on the market again. And the guy had lost his loan on it. And so the federal government moved in on it. And I went in to buy it and the feds would not sell it to me. They sold it to a guy in California for over two hundred thousand dollars less than I was willing to pay for it.
SCANLON: That was the RTC, Redevelopment Trust Corporation (Resolution Trust Corporation) picking up properties for the savings and loans.
PHILLIPS: Where I am living right now, I sold these people a piece of property to the Shepards when I was utilities director, and this was part of the water treatment plant up here. This little chunk out here. And I needed a million dollars to buy that school out east. It was a grade school, and we needed more room for the water department. I could not build a building. They would not let me build a building anyplace. So I sold this little chunk for a million bucks and bought that school.
SCANLON: So the Shepherds, that would have been Bruce and Bud Shepherd?
PHILLIPS: It was Bud that bought it, or we sold it to. I never thought I would live here, but didn’t know what he was going to do with it. And he didn’t do anything with it. Because the guy that bought it from him, he undergrounded the electric, and the guy that bought it from him went bankrupt. And the feds sat on it for fourteen years.
SCANLON: Well, this pretty much brings us to the current except for perhaps your departure from the City. When you left the City, it was a time of your choosing?
PHILLIPS: Yes. Yes. I. It was changing. And it was changing in a way that I was not too excited about, because the city Council was making more and more moves to operate the utilities and take it out from underneath of the hands of the city manager. And that’s why, I think, they had the city managers they had. They hired weaker individuals that would not give them any trouble, and they have never changed. But they were just beginning to show this glimmer when they brought the last one aboard. Very strongly.
SCANLON: That would have been Mr. (James) Mullen, had replaced Zickefoose. And then Lorne Kramer replaced Mr. Mullen. But you had served thirty-two years with the city and your departure was filled with lots of tributes and admiration, so I thank you for your service to the community.
PHILLIPS: It was a marvelous way to grow up. And to serve in your work. I looked forward to every day. Most of them, let’s put it that way. There were a couple or three days in there when I was visiting with juries and that kind of thing that were not. It truly was a marvelous way for me to work, because they gave me gave me room to try to do things that were somewhat new, but followed a path, so we got, we worked out where we belonged and what we belonged with When we built the Nixon Power plant, I had a city council until that was just, they were ready to go down on their knees and shoot me. Because they figured it was a total waste of money. Well, if we hadn’t built that there, there wouldn’t be any city here today. And I don’t know about the one that’s, the gas one that is down there. Because we made a rule, Ray and I sat down, just before he left, we’d just gone, it was the day before he left, and said “There will never be a power plant built in this city again that can’t be used both coal and gas.” And I agreed to that. Because we’d seen what had happened. And make sure you put it some place where that you are not going to have to fight. The people are about to (indecipherable) the emissions off, and all that crap. But it was just a great experience. And as I said over and over again, I had great people to work with. Fine top managers. Sid Nichols, Ray Nixon. Just the tops of the engineering groups and thinkers and this kind of thing. And they didn’t let you get away with much. You either found the right direction or your direction was changed.
SCANLON: Thank you very much.
PHILLIPS: Well, thank you. And if I can help with the dates, I’m sorry, I can’t remember all these dates. I have a hard time remembering a lot of them now a days, so.
SCANLON: Dates can be reconstructed. Thank you very much.

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Oral History Interview
with
James D. Phillips
Interview by
Tim Scanlon
11 November 2006
CSHP 0034
Part 3
Colorado Springs History Project
CSHP
Pikes Peak Library District, Special Collections
Copyright 2015
Colorado Springs History Project
The Colorado Springs History Project was conducted between the years 2005-2010 in a joint effort to document and update the history of Colorado Springs from mid-20th century to 2010. This volunteer team included members from the region’s major academic libraries and faculties, as well as the Pikes Peak Library District and the Pioneers Museum. Administered and supervised by the Colorado Springs History Project Committee, the project interviewers consisted of a number of local volunteers.
The oral history portion of The Colorado Springs History Project identified and interviewed individuals who had helped to shape the city of Colorado Springs in various and diverse ways. Subjects were also sought as representative of inhabitants of the Pikes Peak region and could provide insight into the city’s story in the second half of the twentieth century. The interviews reflect the rapid growth of Colorado Springs and touch on business and government relations, religious organizations, the Air Force Academy, Colorado College, and the growth of many important charitable services within the community.
The collection is comprised of 50 tapes, 19 CDs, and 2 DVDs with 32 individual interviews. These interviews are housed in the archives of Pikes Peak Library District’s Special Collections. A complete listing of the interviews is available at the Special Collections reference desk. Transcripts for many of the interviews are available for use.
Digitization
Audio from the Colorado Springs History Project was digitized between 2009 - 2011 and is available for study and use in the Special Collections department.
The Colorado Springs Oral History Project
James D. Phillips
Oral History Interview
CSHP 0034, part 3
Tim Scanlon
11 November 2006
Colorado Springs, Colorado
PHILLIPS: It’s not flashing at me, but I think it’s recording. So, you had identified that, well, we were in a heavy growth period, or just beginning a heavy growth period. That had started when Ray was director. City Council was very anxious to continue that. Growth was good for the city and good for the people in the city.
SCANLON: So this was mostly capitalizing upon the growth following World War II?
PHILLIPS: Right.
SCANLON: With the expansion of Camp Carson and Fort Carson.
PHILLIPS: Well, actually, it was far beyond that. When, I don’t remember when it became Fort Carson. But it was the Air Force Academy that was the big push at this time. As we discussed earlier, Ray Nixon and the Blue River Project, that was to bring the Air Force Academy in up here. We didn’t have enough water on the Peak to take care of everything. So, that push had been pretty successful. The pipeline had been built, the things were in. We were also building the big pipeline over from Homestake Reservoir on the western slope and we were talking to the federal government regarding other water rights that were over there at the Frying Pan, the Arkansas project. The Frying Pan-Arkansas project was under construction, or under review and getting started well, and that took place under Kennedy’s, he came to Pueblo to announce that they were going to start the project. And that was when Ray was still utilities director. All of those things were in motion at that time.
SCANLON: And it was the fact that the community was making progress in providing sufficient water that was a factor in awarding the Air Force Academy to this community?
PHILLIPS: Well, that was done really and accomplished with the Blue River Water project. There were promises made and we built the big reservoir up here on the divide between here and Woodland Park. That would be Rampart Reservoir. And had a pipeline coming down through the canyon from Rampart Reservoir to a water treatment plant. There were two of them up there, small ones, but there was another large one being built in the Air Force Academy, and it was just, well, started, at that time. But we were able to meet any needs the Air Force Academy would have. And so, that was locked in and they were building the Air Force Academy. They didn’t build it for about two years I think when Ray retired.
SCANLON: So, it’s a period of great growth, a great deal of optimism, I presume, on the part of the community and the Chamber of Commerce and Council.
PHILLIPS: The big push was on. We were going to become another big electronics center. In those days, utilities did not belong to the Chamber, but we were sent to discuss things with them often. And then the homebuilders association was very, very strong in Colorado Springs. And yes, everything was dependent on, the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, and the future electronics, that this was going to become the mountain where the electronics were all built rather than California.
SCANLON: And do you recall who some of the figureheads in the homebuilders association may have been? At the time, some of the developers present would have been a guy named John Ceresa, John Bonforte, Bill Smartt was also a developer of that era. Were these individuals involved?
PHILLIPS: I knew all of them. We worked with them. I had worked before as part of wastewater and then when I moved onto the other job, I began working in all of their areas, their development in the community, and trying to keep everything moving forward with each one of the divisions. The wastewater division was building a new wastewater treatment operation, which was the new activated sludge. The water division was busily building the new water treatment plants, finishing up the Rampart Reservoir, the pump station on the Blue River on the, the Homestake project was being completed, all of those water divisions were very busy. The electric department was quite interested in a new power plant, and Ray Nixon and I had worked to get the land down below to build that the Nixon Power plant is on right now, to get that piece of property. And we bought it from the Wrigley Bull operation. Wrigley’s had owned it. They purchased it from the family that was down there, and they owned it and the ranch up above, and we bought those two for a future power plant, but that was all they purchased. They were there. And the gas division was wandering around in a world that CIG (Colorado Interstate Gas) had promised gas that would be available for our great growth push, and I don’t remember the figures, but we were moving more houses than had ever seen, had seen in Colorado Springs before, on a monthly basis. For years we held the highest month of construction in that time frame, right in there. And suddenly, CIG was suddenly having meetings with us. John Frederick was the director of gas, or superintendent of the gas department. I went to the meetings in Ray’s place. Ray was not too excited about John, who kept telling him that “They were not going to service the present.” CIG kept saying, “Oh yes, we will have the service for you, don’t worry about it. Just keep going and hang on.” But they kept having meetings with all their people and us, and telling us how bad the gas supply was becoming in Texas and down in that part of the country where all our gas came from, and Oklahoma.
SCANLON: So, the head of the organization was being positive, but the technical people were identifying that there were problems.
PHILLIPS: Right. And we had pretty good ties with the technical people. Most of them were local residents, and had been for years. And they would come to me because they had known me for years and not to Ray because they were afraid he’d go back to the president of the company and tell them. And they were telling me to get ready because it is going to hit you. And so John Frederick and I were very, very locked in to trying to figure out what we could do to help. We made trips to the northern part of the state where we could buy a gas well and we brought a hundred and forty-four thousand dollar check with us. They drilled 1,200 feet in one day, and if they hit gas, we owned the well and if we didn’t, we were out a hundred and forty-four thousand bucks. John and I were not quite that big of gamblers, we did not want to play that game. We looked at storage facilities, the coal mines in the north where if we got a surge of gas, we could store it and then move it to Colorado Springs. All those things were being reviewed and the rest of it was all moving and everything was really going fast. Smartt, all of those people you mentioned, all had a lot of money tied into the community, and they were really twisting the utilities’ arm to keep up with them. We kept trying to get them to have to pay for what they were getting. We got it in some areas, and in some areas we didn’t, the amount of money we really needed.
SCANLON: So, there were certain standards that had to be met for the installation of utilities. And was there any issue with regard to meeting those standards?
PHILLIPS: Well, in those days, we did not have federal government down our backs with the health departments with wastewater and water. With electric and gas, we did not have any federal rules or regulations of any great penalty side on emissions. That kind of thing. They were just beginning to show up. The problem areas that were to come were just beginning to show up. The wastewater division had been the stepchild for so long in the utilities department, because when I first went to work down there, we collected twenty-five cents a month per house and seventy-five cents for businesses in fees. And poor old John Frederick, he had to make his, when he was down there, by himself, before I got there, they had to put out their own bills every month. And if they didn’t get their bills out, they didn’t get paid. So, wastewater had a tough time. The unit itself had been built in a vegetable patch that was, belonged to the General Palmer had that piece down there. And they ran all the sewer lines down out of this major portion of the center of the city, down on to that little area over there on East Las Vegas (Street) right now, and they raised vegetables and this region and hauled them back out and sold them to the people. But, the lines were not good, but we were starting to build some bigger lines when I left the wastewater division. And we built a thirty inch line down into that country and some others a little earlier than that. Well, I was there what, fifteen years. And during that time, we built a number of larger lines. It also got me into an area that was becoming far more important, I don’t think, than anyone thought it would be, and that was reuse of water. We were having some little problems with droughts again. And the City Council came to Ray and said “What can we do?” Ray turned around to John and I and said “What can we do to get some additional water?” And so John, he knew where the gas department had two old tanks that they had used to make, I think we talked about this earlier, the coal gases for lighting the streetlights downtown and they’d set them aside when electricity became available to them. And so we went down and got those and turned them into the water filtration. And that has grown probably into one of the most important areas that we’re going to see in this community before it’s all over. The Smithsonian, not the Smithsonian, the two big government organizations I got involved with gave us grants, and we did some experimental work that had not been done in the United States with sewage before, and had excellent luck with it. What finally developed was what was going to be in this new plant up north.
SCANLON: So, this was an early example of taking sewage, treating it in some fashion, to generate a certain degree of water quality such that it was non-potable but fairly clean by urban standards.
PHILLIPS: At that time, it was enough. At that time, it was at the same time we were sending people to the moon. And the astronauts had been asked to drink, there they had filtrations systems on some of the spacecraft that would produce drinking water and they were, I guess they wouldn’t use that. They used the water off their batteries, which could have had acids in it that had been corrosive and not good. But I even got the big problem when I gave a speech at a downtown meeting one day and informed the people that someday, they would probably would be drinking their own waste. And I don’t know exactly how it was worded at that time. We had a switchboard, and the next day, after it came out in the newspaper, that was flooded by calls from people that said “Never is that going to happen.” And all this. Now, I got into some hot water over that. Ray thought it was kind of funny in the end. But it really is the beginning of what may be the future. The reuse of water is certainly not unheard of.
SCANLON: Well, it is my understanding that there was a study done and the analysis of the water in the Mississippi. By the time it reached New Orleans, had been used somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to twelve times before it got to New Orleans.
PHILLIPS: Well, we use to have a joke with the people we worked with out of Kansas City, saying that if they didn’t like the water, don’t worry about it. All nine of us enjoyed it before they did.
SCANLON: Ok, well, so it’s a time of great opportunity. The economic engine is thriving at that time. It’s probably the, the era, where growth is regarded as good and beneficial, and we in the community are reaping the benefits of all the growth, the jobs, the housing, we’re expanding, you know, at tremendous strides. It, 1972 was also a period where we were starting to get inflationary pressures in the nation as a whole, and they were concerned about inflation and so, you had mentioned that Mr. Nixon was pressured to step down by the employee retirement association.
PHILLIPS: I was not involved in what was taking place. Yes, I understand that that did happen to him.
SCANLON: Why would they be concerned about that?
PHILLIPS: Well, in those days, PERA (Public Employees Retirement Association) was just getting going good. And they had rules and regulations that still stand today, that at a certain point, they did not want you still working, if you could retire. And the City took those to heart and said he had to leave. And so Ray was retired. They gave him a year’s salary when he retired to make him feel better about it, because he was afraid that he would not have enough money to retire on. Well, the PERA paid well, even in those days. And his salary was certainly not the kind of salaries that I ended up with, or the people that are there today have. It’s a totally different world than both of those. Ray was quite upset, but Ray was also getting pretty old and he was having some problems. I think the City Council I don’t know. In those days, City Councils were behind closed doors except when they were ready to go out in the public.
SCANLON: So, they would announce,
PHILLIPS: All the meetings, all the meetings were held in there. There were some wild fights that went on in those meetings. People screaming at one another. “This is good, and that’s bad.” Because there was not as much joy in this community as you might think about the growth.
The homebuilders were a bunch of bad people that were trying to wipe the community out. Locals who had lived here forever were going to keep it the same little tourist city it had always been. And there were battles, open pitched battles between the two of them. A lot of words thrown around. But they used to go into these meetings and close the door and then the battle was on. And I got to go to most of those with Ray and sit through those.
SCANLON: So, would this, these battles be among Council members?
PHILLIPS: Yes.
SCANLON: Or would members of special interests been a part of these?
PHILLIPS: No, just Council members and staff. They never allowed the outside world in. The homebuilders had a certain group that were for them, and the local keep-it-the-way-it-is people had a group for them, and there was a group for the Chamber (of Commerce). Breaking up nine people into a sixteen person group was kind of tough at times. But they did a pretty good job of attempting to grow. There also were problems. We had council members at that time that some people did not like and didn’t want. And one was Doctor (Fred) Sondermann was considered bad news. He was CC (Colorado College). He was not the right kind of man to have on the Council.
SCANLON: He was a biology professor?
PHILLIPS: He was Jewish. No, he was a history, an economics prof. Very bright man. And get a little further here, in a few minutes, when the gas moratorium took place, he was my salvation during the gas moratorium, as far as the Council was concerned. But, we had all of those things going on and then, I can’t remember the exact date, it should be branded in my mind, but we went into Council meeting and CIG had given Ray a letter before we left the office, and he didn’t let me read it. He just, we walked out and got up to the courthouse and went into the City Hall and went into the meeting room He handed it to me to read there, and there was the thing from CIG stating that they were going to reduce our gas load. We would only handle those people who were living here now and there would be no extra gas. He and I really didn’t have a chance to talk about it, but we kind of went over into a corner and he said “What do you think we do?” and I said “Well, you know the only thing we can do is a moratorium.” Because we discussed these things before, with John and with these other people. And he was saying “I was afraid that was what you were going to say.” So he got up, god love him, and told the City Council that “This is it.” We have no more natural gas and we’re going to have to call a moratorium immediately. There will be no messing around with this. We will set up what we can to help guide people who need things that, builders that were in process at the present moment, and on and on. The whole story. To the City Council. Well, they went swinging through the trees. They were furious. At Ray. They thought it was his fault, and it wasn’t, Ray had no control over it, whatsoever.
SCANLON: So, at this time, natural gas was being used for both heating and for cooking.
PHILLIPS: For residences. And power plants.
SCANLON: And power plants, so there was an industrial aspect to this, also.
PHILLIPS: Yes.
SCANLON: Was there any, was there any reaction to possibly using electric power for heating and cooking, for residences?
PHILLIPS: There was a lot of that thought. But the problem was, at that time, we had some coal burning but not fully coal-burn, available coal. The north plant had been built with a bunkered area to use coal and we put on natural gas. There was great fear by the City Council, we could not go ahead and use coal up there because we were so close to the card place, the people that make all the cards are located. Can’t think what their name is.
SCANLON: Current?
PHILLIPS: Current. Was right across the street. And with the dust coming out of the coal being handled in there. It would get into their printing operation, and destroy their operation, and we’d be sued. So, we couldn’t do that one. Birdsall, that’s Birdsall, the ones down along the creek down there, were both coal and gas. And we attempted, we couldn’t get all we wanted off to get them on coal fast enough to do us any good. And we also needed capacity, also. We did not have enough. That’s why the land had been purchased down below Hanna Ranch. Things were just pretty bleak. There was no available power on the market in those days. Moving power was not like it is today. It was just not done quite the same way. So, there we stood without anything to do, and it was Ray’s, it was two days before Ray left. So, I took over.
SCANLON: And at this point, you had already been identified as,
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes, I had already have been. The announcement had already been made. Some of these I do have some clippings that were kept. A little thing, I don’t know what. From 1900 to 2000. I don’t even know who wrote that. See, there’s things like this, I don’t know. This is the water stuff. And we had also got money from them to build the wastewater treatment plant on Pikes Peak. That was another one of my little projects. I kept the City Council, I kind of think, somewhat fascinated. I just changed some marvelous things, like going to England on city money to look at projects they had going over there in the disposal of sludge where we cooked it and made big blankets out of it. And at the same time, before I moved up, we got into terrible trouble hauling the sludges. John Frederick left, and we were left with all of this sludge that had to be disposed of. Finally we started hauling it to the airport and burying it in trenches out there. And people who lived along the road where we were hauling complained of this horrible odor. Well, these were closed trucks. There was no odor coming off any of the trucks, but there were a lot of them. And we kept hauling all that stuff out.
SCANLON: And the airport was selected just simply because it was away from,
PHILLIPS: It belonged to the City. Where we didn’t get into any arguments with the owners. We tried other lands that were closer, but people didn’t want us in there.
SCANLON: And so, was there any concern about groundwater contamination back in that time?
PHILLIPS: Not particularly.
SCANLON: Of course, the City was not reliant upon groundwater wells.
PHILLIPS: We weren’t relying on anything.
SCANLON: And, inasmuch as Colorado Springs is not located on a major waterway, and is the only Front Range,
PHILLIPS: Or the United States that is this size that isn’t on a major waterway.
SCANLON: There are many other communities that do rely on groundwater.
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes.
SCANLON: Can you share some of the thinking behind Colorado Springs seeking to pipe in water rather than rely on groundwater?
PHILLIPS: Well, it was somewhat of a surprise to everybody, I think, when Ray, me, the first moves to get the, there we go, I think everyone was a little surprised when Ray said he was going to start bringing in trans-mountain diversion water. This had been done for over a hundred years in Colorado. They would move water from the western slope to the northern Colorado area when the big droughts in the 1920’s took place. It started up there. They started moving water across, and those were the first water rights that were moved from the west slope to the east slope. So it had been done. And there were water rights that were floating around at that time. And they were cheap. They seemed very expensive. I think we paid something like twenty-six dollars an acre foot for the Blue River. There was an engineer who had done planning on the project who had purchased the rights and he sold out for this enormous sum of twenty-six dollars an acre foot. But when you are buying ten thousand acre feet, that was a good slug of money. And so, a lot of people griped and moaned about what he was doing with the water. He brought it down, I think we talked about this, where he brought it in and dumped it into Elevenmile Canyon, put a pumping station in Lake George, just out there by Lake George, and pumped it up on the peak. Where he could then pump it on across and get it in into the reservoir on the Rampart Range. Oh, a lot of people thought it was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to us. But, it was water, and it was working. Then came the Homestake. And Homestake was another one where an engineer had filed on those water rights over in there, and he sold, I don’t remember what the price was on that. I was doing other things at that point. In time, I suppose, and didn’t keep track of it. I wasn’t really involved much when that was brought in and there were problems. We drained, or drilled that tunnel, that mad tunnel over there and under the continental divide and had city people who weren’t allowed to go into the, some of the female council members came to the door of the tunnel to go in and the miners said, “They come in and we go out.” Those were still the days when women were not allowed underground. They were bad luck. And so, these were bad times.
SCANLON: But it seems as though that the water rights would have been cheap, particularly compared to the infrastructure necessary to deliver the water.
PHILLIPS: There was nothing that was considered cheap. Everything was too much money. You didn’t have that kind of money. You could not spend that kind. “What are your doing, out there, spending thirty cents a foot for putting pipe in the ground?” There wouldn’t even (indecipherable) at you.
SCANLON: It still would have been considerably more expensive than drilling ground wells locally.
PHILLIPS: Well, the thing was, people did not like groundwater. They didn’t like the idea of groundwater. This community has a major problem with groundwater that most people don’t know anything about, and it’s an iron bacteria called crenoprix. And you get this water in these wells out here, you get that well infected with this bacteria. The water turns red, tastes like iron doo-doo, and stains everything it gets on. Black Forest has a lot of wells that have this, and people, they now have filter systems that they are on, but it still isn’t great water. So, a lot of people who’d live in this community for a long time had drilled wells in the past, had problems with them, couldn’t solve the problems in those days. There had been a surface water operation in the beginning, and then because of the grasshoppers, had changed to the pipelines. The pipelines had frozen, and then they put in deeper pipelines and they worked pretty good. So everybody said, “Okay, you can move water around with pipes.” And so, they didn’t like it but they accepted it. So, we went that way and continued going that way clear through my time. We bought, there’s the Springs’ water rights for five hundred thousand, this was after we purchased the Twin Lakes water. That was when I was deputy city manager and director. I was taking everyone’s job at that point in time. I can’t remember the costs o the water. Oh, it was. I thought maybe there was a price. I don’t remember. We paid a pretty low price for the water coming out of Twin Lakes. We bought one share, while Ray was still here. We bought probably an eighth of it. It had come up for sale by one of the irrigation companies. When I came up with it, ninety percent of it was left to be sold. The last ten percent of it that was there was an irrigation company that didn’t want to sell out and we paid, I think it was about fifty-four dollars an acre foot for it. And it now sells at seventeen thousand dollars an acre foot. So, you know, boy did I get, when I first became the utilities director, I was taken into the doomed back room and I was told “Get water. Continue to get water any time you can get water.” Well, I got them water. And we came up with the bill. I sent to Denver and signed all of the notes for the City to buy that water, came home and was called into the doom room and was told “You damn fool, what have you done? You’ve bankrupted utilities.” And so, I was going from one jump to another. But that’s a little different area of the story. We were working on the gas moratorium. Going back to the gas moratorium, we had a Council that had problems because they didn’t like some of their own members and they were told “We’re going into a moratorium.” The next morning, before we could get the announcement out to the public, one of the City Council members walked in with about eighty-five permits. We had Sondermann, who was the Jewish gentleman, who everybody thought he was out to do. I don’t know what they thought he was going to do. Turn this into a Jewish community or what, because they just gave him a terrible time. Over the gas moratorium, he actually had nothing to do with it. But with me, he went with me to every speech I had to give to homebuilders, angry audiences and everything else. He sat on the stage with me and none of the rest of them would go with me. It’s pretty remarkable. Even the mayor wouldn’t go, and that was Andy Marshall, grand man. But none of them would travel with me.
SCANLON: Was the City Attorney of any assistance at that point?
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes, he was in there smacking his lips, because three days after I became director, also I had five lawsuits filed against me. The smallest one was nine million dollars. And they were filed against me personally. But the City nicely said they would defend me. So, Louie Johnson and his staff were sitting there just licking their lips. They were waiting. This was going to be a good time. My first year, literally, I spent in court more than I did anything else. I remember the year, I still had people working, thank god I had good managers, that were in charge of the divisions and that were willing to work with us and a Council that was a little aghast at what had happened, but were willing to work with us and we held the city together. But my first year in court, I learned far more about the law than I ever wanted to learn. And in the end, we were, we talked to the, in those days, we were under the state rules and regulations regarding utilities. And they were giving us a rough time. Finally, John Frederick and I had been working on a possible solution for a long time and we had looked at air propane plants. And this meant we could bring in one cubic foot of natural gas and had four cubic feet of air and sell five cubic foot of natural gas that would burn in a home furnace. Which was a darn good idea, we thought. But we had one small problem. The United States was in a moratorium regarding gas. But the governor of the state of Colorado had become the energy czar in Washington (John A. Love). And we needed, I think it was a million gallons of propane, I can’t remember the exact figure, but it seems like a million gallons of propane that we would have for a year’s need. And we needed to get that approved. And the only one that could approve it was a Senate hearing committee that was being pushed around by the past governor. And so, Andy had connections, which was great. He called Washington and they got us permission to come and talk to them about getting this gas at a hearing that was coming up. And we had fifteen minutes to explain our position, what we needed and why we needed it, and then they would take five minutes and then they would be back with an answer. Have you ever heard of the Federal Government moving that fast?
SCANLON: Never.
PHILLIPS: Well, I wrote a deal up. Andy and I flew back to Washington, walked into the thing. Andy said “I won’t talk to these people. You give the talk and I’ll help you to answer questions afterward.” Which was great. We got in there and we were early and fifteen minutes, one company got up and took fifteen minutes. Ford Motor Company got up. Forty-five minutes later, they were still talking. Finally, what was the Governor’s name again?
SCANLON: Was it Governor Love?
PHILLIPS: Love. He beat the gavel on the table and said “Gentlemen, get to the point! What do you want? You had fifteen minutes. It’s been forty-five minutes and the City of Colorado Springs is waiting and as far as we’re concerned, it is just as important as you are.” The guy from the Ford Motor Company, he bristled up. You would have thought they had hit him with a stick. And he said “Well, we would appreciate it if Colorado Springs would give us their time. They can come back to a meeting later.” And the Committee, Love said “No, they’ve come a long way to do the same thing you did. They are going to get their time. If they are willing to let you to have another fifteen minutes, then we will then hear them and we are sorry that the other people, all the other people that were waiting behind us. So, we sat there for another fifteen minutes. I got up then and gave our spiel, our problems, that we needed all this stuff. There weren’t questions from the audience at all and then Love hit his gavel and they took their five minutes. Andy and I sat there looking at the seams and lord help us. Because he walked back. Because they had not given Ford an answer whether they were going to get their gas. They were the first ones that had not gotten anything. And he hit the table and said, “Due to the fact that the people from the City of Colorado Springs are polite, follow the rules and regulations that are laid out, and the need is not that massive, it’s approved.” Well, we had a million cubic feet of natural gas we could buy with the approval of the federal government. And we came back home, and John had already started the work towards getting the propane plant started. None of us had even seen one. We didn’t know what they looked like. And then we had to go get a piece of property, and again, we ran head-on into the horrible gas plant that was going to kill all the people who lived out there on Sand Creek. Because we figured the place out on Sand Creek where we could feed back into the main line coming in from CIG and would cover large areas within the city would work best for us. And all the people who lived out there just north of the Air Force. They had not become, well, they still are not part of the City (Cimarron Hills enclave). But boy did they have some nasty groups. And so, there I was again on the stage saying “If we don’t kill you, we’ll send you a check.” That did not excite too many of them. But I had Sondermann riding with me through this whole thing. And finally the County Commissioners agreed this had to be done for the good of the City.
SCANLON: So, was there any particular commissioner that took the lead in that?
PHILLIPS: No. Those days, the County Commissioners and the City fathers got along pretty well. There was very little, we didn’t like them and they didn’t like us, but it was all over money and we had a hell of a lot more than they did, in those days. It wasn’t one of those things. But, that took almost a year, from what I remember, until we really got under construction again. And during that time, everybody was shooting at us and I was in and out of court still, and the whole bit.
SCANLON: And at the same time, you were building the Nixon plant down south?
PHILLIPS: No, they hadn’t started it yet. And we got in though, before a commission meeting, State regulatory commission meeting, for the cost of the permits. What the gas permits were going to cost the people so they could have this whole thing, and it had to be set up so that we could charge as they came in. We were already charging for permits, it was something like twenty-five bucks, which was only just kind of help build the service line into the house. And they asked this question, and they had not said I was going to have to have all this paperwork and everything done. I was sitting there with a matchbook in my pocket with the only thing to write on, and a pen, and so I busily did my mathematics on that matchbook and I missed the decimal point and we paid for the air propane plant in two years. Totally complete, because I missed it by one decimal point. Maybe it was two. But it was the right way for the City. They argued about the price.
SCANLON: So, the decimal point was to the revenue’s advantage?
PHILLIPS: Yes. There are a lot of people that said I did it on purpose. Tell you the truth, I didn’t. It was a total error, because I. Nobody had a slide rule in those days, we didn’t have computers yet, and here you’re dealing with multi-million dollar figures on the back of a match cover. How could you see all of it? But it worked out well. And we were back and running again. Within a short time, we were selling permits. People kind of shake themselves loose. Those who had threatened to have me killed, or kill me, had become almost friends again. Some of them came later and told me that “You saved my, my life when you called that moratorium. I had money borrowed, or was going to borrow money that I couldn’t have paid back.” And on and on. “You really did a marvelous thing for me.” Well, I wasn’t trying for anything like that.
SCANLON: Well, in, to a very large degree, it was a matter of responsibility. You couldn’t honorably be issuing gas permits for structures that couldn’t be serviced.
PHILLIPS: That’s right. We were very tight about that. We wouldn’t give you an electric connection, either. However, we did allow people to put in, in houses that were being built, they put in electric dryers. Where they had always been gas dryers before in their houses and these kinds of things. And we finally were pushing those, because we were starting to see a loosening of the gas for the power plants. And we had also gotten more coal in. And we had gone to work to finish Unit Number Seven. I think that’s the one you were thinking we were building. Ray had Unit Number Seven at the Martin Drake under construction when I became director. And they had run into major troubles. In fact, funny as it seems, there is a lawsuit still filed, pending, against me, again, personally, over that piece of power plant. And the guy pays his fees every year to keep it alive, but has never gone to court with it. I don’t know what he is waiting for.
SCANLON: So, for the purposes of the interview, the Martin Drake plant is the plant downtown
PHILLIPS: On Las Vegas Street.
SCANLON: Then we have the Birdsall plant which is North Nevada Avenue.
PHILLIPS: Right.
SCANLON: And we’ve got the Nixon plant which is south of Fountain.
PHILLIPS: Right. There’s also another big plant down with the Nixon plant that was built after I retired. Well, Phil (Phil Tollefson) was director. It was a total gas operation that I do not even know, I’ve heard that it’s over five hundred megawatts. But they can’t operate it, because it has. The gas that is coming in has fumes coming off it that the health department and the air pollution control people won’t accept. So I know nothing about that. So, if this comes up, you will have to talk to somebody else.
SCANLON: Okay, so the moratorium was not popular, and was dismissed as soon as was responsible?
PHILLIPS: As soon as we were able to pass permits onto the people? The moratorium was gone and we were back in business again. It took them a little while to shake themselves out and get their carpenters back and their land all straightened out and figure out what they were going to do. And to pay those gas fees. They were a little high, they thought. But, they weren’t high at all.
SCANLON: Well, compared to what they had been paying, they were higher.
PHILLIPS: Yes. So, everything kind of came out just right on that, in the end. It was a bad situation. Too bad it ever took place. When they do, it came out right. And again, it was that we had just top notch people working at the utilities. They, we were able to step forward and give you ideas, and talk over ideas. There were a lot of wild ideas that came out. And you tried to find the best one. And whether we got the best one or not, I’ll probably will never know. The ones we got all were very workable and we were able to take them to a conclusion.
SCANLON: So, it’s my understanding that the composition of Council changed once the moratorium was over.
PHILLIPS: Well, the Council, in 1967, I wish I had my dates down where we could go into them. The Council changed in 1967 and the, well, Marshall was still the mayor in 1969. Well, that has to go through 1970. Andy Marshall was 1971. Yes, in 1972-73, the Council did change. And Ochs (Lawrence Ochs) became the mayor.
SCANLON: That would have been Larry Ochs.
PHILLIPS: Larry Ochs was the mayor.
SCANLON: And it’s my understanding that the development industry castigated those who felt like managing growth or limiting growth as being responsible for the hardship in the building industry. Blaming the gas moratorium.
PHILLIPS: There was a lot of this. It had nothing to do with anything, except their mouths running. It gave them something to talk about. After that period of time, the City gathered together with the Chamber of Commerce and the local builders and citizens groups and everything else and asked “How do we put this City back on its feet? And, what do we want it to look like.” And that was when we truly went in to make this Money Mountain, the electronics mountain, I can’t remember the buzzwords used for that. I traveled with the people from the Chamber to go talk to people because one of the major draws the City has always had, since it became what it was, were utilities. The price was right and they were reliable.
SCANLON: Also, as a public entity, you were accountable, you were responsible. If there were errors or mistakes, you couldn’t keep them hidden.
PHILLIPS: Nope, not at all. And so, everybody we talked to that was looking for a place to get out of the valleys in California came rolling in here.
SCANLON: So, Hewlett Packard was an early industry that came in here.
PHILLIPS: Hewlett Packard was here when I became director. It was the first one that had arrived. And it had done so well that others were willing to come.
SCANLON: And David Packard was a CC (Colorado College) grad, I believe.
PHILLIPS: Yes, he lived in Pueblo. They started their operation in a garage in Pueblo and moved from Pueblo to Colorado Springs.
SCANLON: Okay, so Colorado Springs is back in relatively good shape. It’s thriving, it’s starting to expand. Not just in terms of industry and electronics. Its tourism industry is starting to take off again. It started to become known as a center for education with CC and we had other small schools. Blair College was here for many years. There’s nursing schools and whatnot. So it seems we returned to an even keel.
PHILLIPS: Well, we were certainly outgrowing everything. We had our medical systems. We had Penrose Hospital, which at that time was not called Penrose. It was called,
SCANLON: It was Glockner.
PHILLIPS: Glockner became Penrose. And then we had Memorial, which was a City hospital. Which has always been one of those interesting things. I don’t even know all the answers to and was never able to get involved with them, even when I was acting city manager. They were very touchy about me talking about certain things. But there was some confusion and need they felt for an expansion, of medical needs, within the community. And it was a growing community that needed to grow with it. The utilities department then had to do something about the sludge. The federal government had finally moved in and said “Do something and do it now.” So, we built the big sludge operation down at the Nixon power plant. They were built almost simultaneously. The Nixon power plant was almost up. In the meantime also, the Frying Pan Arkansas project had come into being. From the reservoir, pumping water north to all of us. And I was president of that organization the whole time. From the time it started until I retired. And I fought the federal government tooth and toenails on that baby. Boy, they tried to screw us, but, terribly.
SCANLON: For what purpose?
PHILLIPS: Money. We still don’t own it. We will never own it. No matter how much we pay, we’ll never own it. The federal government set up a contract, but I don’t understand why the City ever signed it. It was done long before my time. And I think everybody thought the federal government would be fair about it. But, you know some things. They didn’t think we checked the bills, I guess. But the bills started coming into the valley associates down there, where we had Fountain and Widefield, and all these people who had little dibs and daubs of the Frying Pan Arkansas project, and the bills would come in and normally we just had to pay those, and kick them on down the line. Nobody looked at them, but then I started looking at them. And suddenly I was finding that we were paying for parking four hundred trailers in Tennessee. And we were paying for things going on in northern California and in Oregon and in Washington D.C. even. Nice big chunks of bill. One hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar, two hundred thousand dollar, this kind of thing added to the bill. Well, I kind of had problems with them when they first billed it because they had built a pipeline where they did build it and for years, I don’t know whether you remember it or if you’re too young, when the Colorado Springs Highway, I-25, going south had slick and slide area where a hill up above would slide right onto the highway and block it.
SCANLON: I had not heard that.
PHILLIPS: That whole area has got a slick and slide plane on it that the. It used to move down into the creek bed all the time and they had to just dig it out again, build another highway. And when they said they were going to build the pipeline where they were building it, I raised all kinds of hell saying “No, you can’t do that. The pipeline would slide down the hill. You cannot do this.” Well, I was informed that they were building pipelines when I was digging holes in my back yard in Victor, and to get out of their way. Well, they did that three times and it slid down the hill and it cost them three million bucks. But, all those kinds of things were going on. The battle with the federal government was not good. It’s not good today. I don’t know where the city is going to come out on that thing, but I still have a lot of friends in the engineering groups and the federal government who were with the group that said to me “Get out of our way,” who came later and apologized. And said “If we had listened, we certainly could have saved everybody some money and things.” They still call me from time to time to see how things are going, and they are still tied to the federal government. They are not working for them, but they are tied, and they give me very disturbing news at times about the whole project. But that’s neither here nor there. I don’t know if it is true or what’s going on, so it really doesn’t matter. But, we had a whole world going at that time, and they still do. The utilities is a major component of this community.
SCANLON: Well, it’s very unusual for a community to own four major utilities. Gas and electric are uncommon.
PHILLIPS: At one time, were, I think, eight of us. A bigger one than ourselves was Cincinnati, Ohio. They owned all four utilities. I don’t know where it is today.
SCANLON: Okay, another major event that utilities was involved with was the southwest annexation. It was what, the Southern Interurban Company was providing utilities for the southwest area?
PHILLIPS: Well, there was a water treatment operation. I don’t remember exactly what their names were, or they changed their names. It was Broadmoor Water that came out of Rosemont (reservoir) up on the top of the hill. It was certainly sufficient. They drilled a tunnel up there so they could get more water off the top. And I worked on that tunnel as a breast tender one spring when I got out of school. I got to see the sides of the tunnel you see the hard way. Pushing the iron. But the Broadmoor kept changing these little names of these. You had the water and sanitation district that were in Cheyenne Canyon. Run by a gentleman by the name of Jim Conley. Suddenly it was split up. Jim had nothing but the wastewater, and another guy that, I can’t remember his name, which was the Skyway something water company. On and on and on. There were all of these little water companies in those two reservoirs sitting up on top of the hill over there where we were going to build a water treatment plant. And that was in the later portions of my career. The Broadmoor wanted out, but they didn’t want out by being annexed. And it had nothing to do. The annexation was a political fight among politicians. By that time, Bob Isaac was the mayor. And it was his decision that we were no longer going to be the footstep for the Broadmoor. That everything they wanted, we supplied for them, and then they turned around and slapped us every time we asked them for something or wanted to do something. And there had been some fights about location of things, and votes and who did this and who did that, and on and on and on and on. A lot of it. And I stayed out of the way. The utilities directors don’t belong on those fights. So, I did finally get sucked in when we met in the chambers down there where the county had built their new building downtown and they had that big auditorium. We held the meeting down there where the decision was made by the City of Colorado Springs Council, sitting up there on the stage, and the people against it out there in the audience, and those of us who were going to be fed to the crocodiles, and there were (indecipherable) being fed to the microphone from time to time. We went through the whole, we were set up to do it and do it right, and we just showed them that if they wanted to survive in the water area, that they had to go with us. We were the only ones that could get water higher enough to serve that community and in quantities that were usable. And we drew X’s on a map showing where we would and wouldn’t serve. This was done with Isaac standing over me and with me with a pen in my hand saying “I don’t want to do this Bob, I’ve never seen this map before. And I know where I am, but I don’t know if this is where I want to put a pumping station.” “Mark it.” So, we did. Well, thank god that map got lost, but there were a lot of arguments for many years where pumping stations belonged and the City said they would supply. It was kind of funny. Most of it was a political game, and utilities just happened to be in there because we had the major, we already served them electricity. But they had their own wastewater. We served them gas. It was just kind of a hodge-podge of things.
SCANLON: So, there were policies at that time relating to the provision of services outside of city limits.
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes.
SCANLON: We could serve them.
PHILLIPS: We charged them higher rates.
SCANLON: So there was a premium. And presumably, that type of arrangement was what, the powers that be in the Broadmoor area would have preferred. Maybe not paying the premium, but rather than annexation, but just being serviced by utilities.
PHILLIPS: They didn’t want to be part of Colorado Springs. They were the Broadmoor. And it was more on that, really, that disliking the politicians and everybody else. The fact that they were the Broadmoor and we were the peons. Now, I’m sure there were far deeper political things going on that I was not aware of. But I didn’t even try to find them because I had enough troubles of my own during those times too. So, we moved forward with that, we annexed the Broadmoor area, and strangely enough, there’s parts of that annexation, excuse me, that have never been carried out.
(Digital recording interrupted.)
SCANLON: Okay, we were taking about the Broadmoor and variable rates for the provision of services. And some of that was regulated by the state?
PHILLIPS: Gas and electric rates were taken care of by the Public Utilities Commission of the State of Colorado. They set the rates, and they allowed us certain privileges of higher rates for outside of our service area. But it was all inside of our service area, or you would have had other power companies and others moving in. Those were the days of expansion. And we had the REA’s (Rural Electric Areas) east of us that would have loved to have sweep through to Nevada Avenue. And were willing to do all sorts of goody things for everybody to do that. That’s Nevada Avenue was, well, up north, there was no problem. They would have taken it. They got part of that, in the end, finally. But, a lot of competition beginning to form.
SCANLON: And at that point, everything was so highly regulated, but differential regulation was coming.
PHILLIPS: Yes.
SCANLON: Not so much deregulation, but differential regulation.
PHILLIPS: Interestingly enough, Colorado Springs, I kind of pushed the levers and kind of got us out from underneath the Public Utilities Commission of the State of Colorado. We made certain commitments at that time that we would not charge beyond the rates that were being established for other communities and those kinds of things by the Commission, unless we could show need. But they didn’t want to come down here for hearings any more than we wanted to go up there.
SCANLON: So, this was roughly what, in the 1970’s?
PHILLIPS: No, this was later than the 1970’s. This was the mid-80’s.
SCANLON: Okay, that’s close enough. Let’s see. We skipped over a couple of things I’m curious about as to whether there was any effect. At one point when Valley Hi Golf Course was built, was that to be serviced with non-potable water, or back then, was that just drinking water?
PHILLIPS: They had a few wells. Most of them was drinking water. Non-potable water came much later. That was when I was director.
SCANLON: So, what was proposed when it became a municipal golf course.
PHILLIPS: It is.
SCANLON: It is now, but it was not originally, was it?
PHILLIPS: Oh no, it was a private club.
SCANLON: So, to your knowledge, was there a great deal of controversy when that was proposed to become a public course?
PHILLIPS: Great battle of the people who said we were saving, lining the country club’s pockets, and all this kinds of thing. Again, another area that I did not stick my nose into. I didn’t feel it was my problem. It was a utility problem, because at that time there was plenty of water. They had what they wanted.
SCANLON: Let’s see, probably really, a lot earlier than these problems, the Chidlaw Building came in. At one point, that was called Pentagon West, just because of its size. And it was being built for the expansion of the Air Force. Were there any noteworthy problems associated with that building?
PHILLIPS: Well, actually, the only wild one was a sewer line. And for some reason, they were concerned about the possibility of someone pushing explosives up the sewer line and blowing up the building. And so, we had a sewer line that went by them, and it was about twelve feet deep and they had some basements in that thing. I don’t know if you ever have been in that building, I don’t know if they still exist today, but they had some basements that were pretty deep, and they were worried that somebody was going to blow them up. And so they put the sewer line in, and out in Union Boulevard is a lift station that has to lift the sewage about thirty-five feet to get it up into the twenty foot deep sewer line that goes through there. It was a mess. We had plenty of power for them, and all the other things. The major thing we had with that was just, it was kind of surprised to get it in a residential district, that kind of thing. But we handled it alright. The divisions again did what they had to do and carried it out.
SCANLON: There has been recent controversy over wastewater spills affecting Pueblo, but this is not a new occurrence.
PHILLIPS: Not at all. Wastewater spills have taken place throughout the years and in fact, the district attorney at one time was going to put me away, deep, dark in the penitentiary, because of a spill. I was director of utilities. Had not been in the wastewater plant to work or take care of the people or anything else for probably five or ten years, I guess. Again, I wish I had done a dating thing on this. But they had some problems in wastewater division with a spill. And as they began to investigate, they began to. The district attorney had decided he wanted to be the district attorney for the state of Colorado. And he started the whole thing out with an investigation of the City of Colorado Springs and the destruction of the block between the utilities building where the big garages are all built and the courthouse right now. Those were all military bars and it was kind of a rough area and on down over the hill, going out to the black nightclub that was there.
SCANLON: The Cotton Club.
PHILLIPS: The Cotton Club. But that whole area of Colorado Avenue, on the south side, were cold girls and hot beer and things like this were the signs all along there. Well, there were a couple of pool halls in there that had pool tables. And they had brought in city employees who were working for some federal organization that was taking care of this demolition and everything else. And the pool tables somehow got removed and were sold. And the employees supposedly had pocketed the money. I do not know any more than that kind of thing. But, the district attorney at that point, what the hell was his name, I’ll think of it here in a second. But he said that’s a pretty good idea, he got a lot of headlines out of that baby. And it was coming time to run for attorney general of the state of Colorado. So he bound himself up and he went into this wastewater problem.
SCANLON: Was this, perchance Russell?
PHILLIPS: Russell (Robert Russell), yeah.
SCANLON: Was it Bob Russell?
PHILLIPS: Bob Russell. So Bob decided he was going to climb on my back and become a politician by destroying me. So he brought in two or three investigators he sent down to the wastewater division. And one of these guys, I don’t know, he was mad at the other people who worked down there. And I guess he was mad at me for some reason from years past. He’d worked down there. He told the, one of these people from the district attorney, that I’d come down there at midnight one night and opened a big valve to dump all this sludge into the creek.
SCANLON: You personally?
PHILLIPS: I personally. Totally, completely ridiculous. Wouldn’t have done it in the first place, but in the second place, I wouldn’t have done anything like that anyway. I don’t even know I was sure I knew where that valve was. But I had gone down there with the newspapers and showed them a valve going out from a pit into the creek that was supposed to be capped, and it was not. They had them dry up the creek and found that thing was sticking out there. Well, that thing led to me being charged with, god, oh, I know what it was. It was finally rather strange, because they charged me with the same thing that is on the bottom of your income tax that you send in every year, and mine and everybody else’s. If you sign this and certain things are untrue, that you are liable for incarceration, et cetera, et cetera. There’s been one person in the United States that’s ever been held under that charge. And I was number two that’s come up.
SCANLON: So you were actually indicted?
PHILLIPS: Oh yes, I was indicted by a grand jury. And when I walked in and the grand jury had four people sitting on it that had been in battles with the city over things. And I was involved because I was part of it. They didn’t want. There was a lot of growth up here in the north that they were teed off about. Somehow they had gotten on that jury, and I thought “You’re going down the tubes, buddy, because those people are going to vote you out.” Because I had told some of them it was none of your business what was happening twelve blocks away from their house. I was getting older and cantankerous in those days. But, they put this all together and they also had, I think there were fifteen or twenty employees at the wastewater division that they were going to send to the pen, under the same thing. And I appeared before a grand jury and I had to testify and swear that I would never tell anybody what happened, and et cetera, cetera, cetera. And they finished grilling me at two o’clock in the morning. Which was a little strange, anyway. This is not done normally. But I had good attorneys, which you did not have attorneys in the room with you in those days.
SCANLON: I think you still don’t.
PHILLIPS: Oh yes, you can have your attorneys.
SCANLON: Going into the grand jury?
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes. And I have to keep track of those things, because you never know when somebody is going to crawl out from under a rock and say “What did he do twenty-five years ago.” So, they took me to court three times to indict me. And three times I refused to testify in any way, shape or form, and the judge just shook his head and said “We’ll try again.” Three times, and the third time, I was excused with an apology. I don’t know exactly what happened, except that they found out that what had supposedly taken place, did not. But going back to where we really should be on this, and that was discharges, there were a lot of them that took place. Not as many or as big as they’ve had here lately. We didn’t have the stream crossings that came later in my career, after I was utilities, or, wastewater division director. I built some of those big crossings. Sand Creek and the one that washed out, that caused all the problems for them before, that was built when I was utilities director, probably in my fourth or fifth year. And it was a hell of a, it had a concrete enclosure over it that was half the size of this room. And we dug so deep into Sand Creek that we figured that sand would never wash out that deep. Well, it did, and it ripped that thing out, and that’s when they got that big dump. No one had ever said anything about these before. We would go tell the state health department and they would come out and look at them, and they would blubber, blubber, blubber. And then the federal government came in and suddenly they were talking about you should be fined for this and fined for that. I don’t think, when I was utilities director, that the wastewater division was ever fined for anything. They were yelled at a number of times. Pueblo has been dumping forever. I went down. One of the first things John Frederick did was to take me to Pueblo wastewater treatment plant as a lesson as to how not to run a wastewater treatment plant. And we went down there, and I’ll never forget it. They had these big boilers that they heat the sludge in to go to the digesters and John was pointing to this thing and he banged on the side and his thumb went right through the side of the boiler because it was so thin and rotten. He was so embarrassed. I tried not to laugh, because it was kind of funny. But we had great, when I was there, I had great relations with Pueblo, their water, they have a water company that they work with. It belongs, I guess, to the city. I never quite understood how this all worked. But they paid big slugs of money into the City Council. And we had good relationships. Every thirty days I had a meeting with their City Council. We put on a dinner down there for them and then they would put on a dinner up here for us and back and forth, back and forth, and we always kept up with one another. I had the City Councils coming to those. We kept them talking to one another. And then they gave all of that up.
SCANLON: When was that?
PHILLIPS: When Phil (Phil Tollefson) became the director. He didn’t feel he had to do that. He went, he didn’t take his people, and he didn’t take the City Council, from what I understand. Now, I don’t know that much about it. I again never dealt into what he did and he didn’t do.
SCANLON: It occurred after you had left. When you were utilities director, up until 1985, there was, the city manager at least for a long time was a gentleman named George Fellows.
PHILLIPS: Yes. Fantastic man. And you should talk to him.
SCANLON: He’ll be the one I interview next. But it’s my understanding he was a civil engineer and he had an understanding of utilities?
PHILLIPS: George had a degree in city management and in engineering. He had been the city manager in Pueblo for, I don’t know how many years, before he moved up here, and he had been city manager someplace else. And yes, he had an understanding, but he never, in all the time I was there, George never, hardly gave me a halfway order to do anything. I was there to run it, and I damn well ran it. The only problem I ever had with George is that as he went along later and he didn’t want to be the bad guy. I got sucked in on some things. The firing of the park department manager who had torn his girlfriend’s door off of her apartment, and he had to be fired and George wouldn’t do it. He called me in and he said “You have got to do it. He doesn’t work for you, and therefore we won’t get sued if you take him in and listen to him, and figure out whether he should be fired or not.” And all this kind of stuff. And I ended up firing a couple of people that he didn’t want to. But George was one of the finest city managers you are ever going to meet. He’s the only city manager I’ve been around. I have seen other city managers and they were not city managers.
SCANLON: Other people held the position and title but not fitting the role?
PHILLIPS: They did not understand how to make a city operate. We had some fine city managers in our time. I knew Mosley (John Mosley) only from reading about him. And Blunt, and Kenneth Clark. John Biery, I worked under him as the city manager, and he was very good. And George Fellows was next. And he had been there for, I don’t know how many years George was city manager, but quite a few.
SCANLON: I think it was nineteen, because I arrived in February of 1985 and I think he stepped down in May of 1985.
PHILLIPS: Yes. But he was just the city manager’s city manager. And he did not give me too many problems, any of the time I was there.
SCANLON: Then, following Mr. Fellows stepping down, there was a nationwide search and a gentleman named Larry Blick was appointed city manager. There was some controversy, it was not a unanimous decision, and Mr. Blick served a short period of time.
PHILLIPS: Yes. He served, I don’t know, about maybe two years? Or was it that long?
SCANLON: I don’t know that it was that long.
PHILLIPS: They got involved with the park department and the Ski Broadmoor. And Larry was quite excited about it. A man from back east, or wherever he’d came from.
SCANLON: Florida.
PHILLIPS: Florida, I guess. The south. He didn’t know anything about ski areas. And you know that, snow down here was kind of a unique situation, it doesn’t happen very often. And the park department manager was a good talker. He was a nice guy.
SCANLON: His name was Larry Shenk.
PHILLIPS: Yes. Larry was a nice guy and he did bits of good things for the park department. But he got into the Broadmoor, what do you call it, I don’t know, I’m not going to say this because I won’t on tape. But there were some problems far beyond personnel problems out there, that had to be cleaned up. Or we would have had to bring in much heavier action than what took place. But he was blowing money left and right and City Council was furious and they kept telling him to slow down and he just kept going full blast. He bought this snowmaking equipment off Pikes Peak, hauled it down here, set it up, started making snow. You can blow the chemical all you want out the side of the mountain, but if there isn’t the cold, things to make the chemical go, you didn’t get snow. And he was always going to be open by Thanksgiving day every year and it didn’t work even when he did have snow blowing equipment. But he just went on and on, and finally the City told Blick to stop him and get him over and Blick, more or less, didn’t have the gumption or whatever it took to stop him. So, I was brought in. And I was told by the City Council that they didn’t have time to go find another manager and they needed an acting manager for about three months, and would I do it? Well, as the friendly old greybeard, I said “Sure, I’ll be glad to do that for all of you neophytes who were just sitting on the city council.” And Bob Isaac was still the mayor. And it was rather interesting, because I was there a lot longer than three months. And they got, they were great fights. They wanted me to apply for the city manager’s job, and I told them I did not want it. It was not my cup of tea. And they forced me to apply and I really did very little to help myself along. But Mrs. Makepeace wanted a city manager who had a city management background or degree. And she wouldn’t take anybody else. And so they brought in, I can’t think what his name was either. He was from Arizona.
SCANLON: Roy Pederson.
PHILLIPS: Roy Pederson, who got fired from stealing money from the Arizona government or something, I don’t know.
SCANLON: Well, it was also, we never believed Mr. Pederson ever moved to Colorado Springs.
PHILLIPS: Oh he did, he lived up north right off Woodman Road, over there where the toadstool rocks are. He had a house up there that he rented and he threw parties up there like you wouldn’t believe.
SCANLON: Yes, well, there is a difference between occupying and residing. We never knew he actually moved here.
PHILLIPS: He never did. He knew that this old boy down there who was going to retire and he needed an interim job. And so he came here to do it. And he did a job on us. He changed a lot of rules and regulations that should never have been touched. And he got some council people to go along with him because he was the fair haired boy. And on and on and on. When he left, I guess it was Dick Zickefoose.
SCANLON: Now Zickefoose had been the department head in charge of personnel.
PHILLIPS: Yes, he was in charge of personnel. There was no such thing as a department. There was Zickefoose and his minions.
SCANLON: Which seemed a little odd that somebody from that background, you know. If there had been an insistence upon somebody with a city management background and degree, then turning to this gentleman seemed odd to us in the city.
PHILLIPS: It seemed odd to all of us. But the city was in such throes over not having a city manager that, you know, I knew of things that were going on and that even as acting city manager, I would not have acted upon because there would have been major problems. I had already gone through a strike in the utilities, and some other things that I just didn’t need that. And I was still trying to run a utilities department and at the same time, we were trying to take in that huge annexation east.
SCANLON: The Banning Lewis annexation.
PHILLIPS: The Banning Lewis annexation. Which the attorney, the city attorney, Jim Colvin, should be given a medal and a steel helmet and a tank for the rest of his life, because through his drive and my work with him, controlling and trying to stay out of Bob Isaac’s way, and Bob would die if he could hear me saying this, we made them sign that agreement. They are going to pay for now. And we finished up at three o’clock in the morning and finally got their signatures.
We had gone all night long and all day.
SCANLON: And this was negotiations with representatives of.
PHILLIPS: And attorneys and old Jabba the Hut. That was the guy who owned, who was trying to do it. I considered him Jabba the Hut because he invited myself and two of my managers over to a meeting in his office penthouse, and we walked in and there was this huge table and there was a couch-like thing at the far end, and we walked into the room and nobody was there. And then we heard this voice say “Oh, come on up closer.” And a light kind of came on, and here he is, like a Roman emperor, or Jabba the Hut. I don’t know whether you have watched those. Lying on his couch, big fat slob, saying to us “I’m here to help you people understand what real business is like.” Well, he and I and the mayor had already had it out because the mayor had said to me certain things, and I said “That man’s a four flusher.” And he said “You can’t call him that, you don’t know this.” This was about the time he had taken the Broadmoor’s center over there and filled it full of sand for his kid’s bar mitzvah. And so the mayor said, “Well, you can’t say things like that about him, Jim. You just got to be careful or you are going to get canned over this whole thing.” and I said “Well, fine, you are just going to have to can me Bob, because that guy is a four flusher and he’s out to get us.” So I was put on the no-no list. And by Bob. He was really teed off at me. But we made him sign. And my appendix broke about an hour and a half later and I ended up in the hospital. I was having major problems with the doctor that kept telling me it was my gall bladder. I almost didn’t make it.
SCANLON: No kidding. A burst appendix is serious, even today. So you were closely involved with Jim Colvin in the Banning Lewis annexation and presumably a lot of your concern was the adequate provision of infrastructure to service the housing. It’s no different from what was confronting you at the beginning of your career.
PHILLIPS: No, it was totally different.
SCANLON: How so?
PHILLIPS: We had control when I first came in by not having a line available. And the only way you could get a line would be to pay portions or all of it to get it to where you were going. What he wanted to do out there was he wanted to develop the lines, all the utilities, the roads, bridges, whatever, all done before he started building houses. And any place on that piece of property people wanted to build, they could build. And somehow we were to get that to them and he would pay for it. Says here in fine print. But we never were able to get that in writing until we got this thing put together that said, “Design the whole damn thing, build it any way you want to build it, but you are going to pay for every stick that takes place and every cost we come up with.” And he didn’t like that.
SCANLON: So was that, was that a significant change in policy or was that a continuation?
PHILLIPS: See, before, when I said a sewer line was underground, we financed, signed a contract with the developer to put the sewer line in the ground. And the costs of it was charged to the contractor. And then as we made connections, that money was then sent back to the contractor. He got his money back, but we didn’t move unless he was willing to pay for the whole thing and would sign a contract.
SCANLON: So he would have to front the costs and get reimbursement over time.
PHILLIPS: Water was not quite the same way. They charged differently on water, to get their money back. Electric and gas, under the rules and regulations of the state of Colorado, we had to expand as the system, as we saw it in the right way so it wasn’t hurting other people. And that made it easy to keep those two under control. We also had connection fees, and that kind of thing. But we were doing an awful lot of undergrounding by then.
SCANLON: So Aries (Frank Aries) wanted, basically, city utilities to front-end the costs of the construction of infrastructure.
PHILLIPS: That’s right.
SCANLON: And then he would choose to pay us back as, according to the contract.
PHILLIPS: Yes. And he could build any place on the property he wanted to. We would have had miles and miles of pipeline under the ground that might not be used for years.
SCANLON: And it starts to deteriorate from the moment you build it.
PHILLIPS: That’s right. So that one was one of the biggest hits we made. And as I say, Jim Colvin was the only thing that. There will be people that tell you that Bob made it go, but Bob didn’t make that. That’s one, and I love old Bob, he’s a grand man to work with. But that’s one he did not. He was sold hook, line and sinker.
SCANLON: Well, it was also an era where money was flowing and the savings and loans were providing funding such that it triggered the collapse.
PHILLIPS: Well, the money that was going in this thing was being taken from a gambler out of Arizona and Bob was well aware of this. And we all were scared to death that he was going to walk in there some day and say “Well, you guys have taken such and such from me and I want. You know, who do you know is going to do what.” Those kinds of people. We hadn’t dealt with people like that before. He was probably the biggest four flusher we had ever run into in any of them
SCANLON: Looking back over your career at utilities, it seemed as though you were not interested in change for the sake of change. There was a continuity from the decades such that there were no significant internal changes that are noteworthy. It was almost as if professionalism and commitment to your job was more important than the management fad of the day.
PHILLIPS: That’s true. I came up through Ray and George and I was aligned to a situation that said from past history, what should the future be? And if you could get a future that looked good, you better shoot for it. You take off on a new bent, now the non-potable water thing was a total new bent, but it did not mean a thing to anybody except that if it ever really happens. That was something we should know about, because if you can take care of it, it would take care of other problems we had. But that’s the way we worked. The water treatment plants, the purchase of the Twin Lakes water, the water that we didn’t quite finish up on. I went back in and bought all of it. And ended up, we own it today and we can move most of it, but we can’t move all of it. We own Twin Lakes. Before Ray had gotten a hold of it, we owned the lakes. And Ray sold it to the federal government, with the Council’s approval, so we did not have to take care of the dam.
SCANLON: Twin Lakes also has an interesting element with an electric generation item that depends upon the differential between rates of peak and non-peak hours to pay for itself. Whose idea was that?
PHILLIPS: That was the federal government. This was a standard situation with them. You had to pump the water uphill and run it back down to get the power out of this thing. And so if it was in peak hours, you had to pay a higher price than you did on non-peak hours to pump the water up, so you could run it down so you could sell it at the higher prices and peak hours and it goes on and on and on. Yes, that’s feds.
SCANLON: But it seems the capital investment to put that into place would take decades to amortize the costs.
PHILLIPS: The federal government doesn’t worry about that. The federal government, that plant, have you ever been to it?
SCANLON: Yes.
PHILLIPS: And it is underground, as you know. They wanted to build it up along the shore in the beginning. We wanted them to build it up along the shore. It would have been a grand building. It’s sticking out there so far as those people like myself that likes power plants. But everyone else wanted it buried. The money they spent on that thing was ridiculous. It’s only a hundred megawatts, two-fifty watt operation units.
SCANLON: It’s very small. It makes a nice visitor’s center.
PHILLIPS: Oh, yes. We always used to have a marvelous time taking people down through that when we had those doors. We’d lose them, but.
SCANLON: Did you ever, the municipal utilities building sits just north of the city administration building on South Nevada Avenue. Had you ever officed in there?
PHILLIPS: You mean 18 South Nevada? Oh, yes. I was in Ray’s office probably for five years. For three years afterwards, we didn’t build the building on the corner (city administration building). We had to condemn all the properties which we were condemned for. Let’s see, we got rid of a hotel that had a very nefarious reputation.
SCANLON: That was the Rex?
PHILLIPS: Yes. It was sold by the hour. Then there was a bar on the corner that was not worth much, but you would think we were taking away part of the historical remnants of the city of Colorado Springs before we could get it all done. Also, there was always the feeling that there wasn’t enough money. We just didn’t have enough money to have the offices where we needed them, that kind of thing. And we finally got it and we built it (city administration building). And it was to be occupied by a minimum of seventy-five percent utilities employees and twenty-five percent others, which meant general city. Today it’s one hundred percent general city, I guess. I don’t know how the bond even came out. I’m sure it was all worked out.
SCANLON: Oh, you mean for the City Administration Building.
PHILLIPS: Yes. Eighteen South Nevada was a fire station.
SCANLON: Correct. That was the original fire station number one.
PHILLIPS: Yes, and it was a grand old building. And we, John Frederick, became my assistant finally, and we had redone it so that it met the hysterical rules of the community. Historic, I’m sorry. And we found things, you know, clocks embedded in the wall, marble clocks embedded in the wall, and all these things. It was fun to even do that one. We tied it then to the other building. I guess now they are trying to sell it.
SCANLON: It has been sold.
PHILLIPS: It has been sold. What’s going into it, do you know?
SCANLON: It’s, well, there’s a firm called Land Development Company, I believe, and they are looking at it just an investment, selling it to somebody else. Maybe turn it into a restaurant.
PHILLIPS: Well, it will make a nice one.
SCANLON: Well, it’s really kind of interesting. It has been identified as an art deco building, perhaps the best in downtown.
PHILLIPS: One of the few ever built in this part of the country with that art deco, gothic outside on it.
SCANLON: And legend has it that the large windows fronting on the sidewalk were used to display modern electric conveniences.
PHILLIPS: Yes, this was one of the, utility companies in Colorado, public service company, started all that, I imagine. I don’t know when they started putting. But they sold washing machines and washers and things And this was one of the things that the early people may have wanted to do in that building. But never really had enough room. They had that big counter, as you came in. And on the other side was the cage.
SCANLON: And you had the stairway going up to the mezzanine level. Then the building was expanded later on, going all the way back to the alley.
PHILLIPS: Well, there were two expansions. Most people don’t know about it. One time they expanded the upper floors and left a parking lot underneath. And then I needed more room for the people who were doing the billings and those kind of things, and I moved the parking garage out of there and built that other floor down there. And it kept us going for a little while longer, because, I tell you, squeezing a building out of that city council was well, that was like getting gold out of a squeezy fish. It was just not done. When we built the big warehouse up north, I was not in the management section. I was still in the wastewater department, but John Frederick me up to them to help design on that building.
SCANLON: So this was the service center on Fontanero?
PHILLIPS: The service center off Fontanero. And you‘d have thought we’d been given another large kingdom of modern wonderful buildings, and it was a tin structure that could have been blown over by a halfway wind. And still is, as far as I know.
SCANLON: Oh yes, it hasn’t changed.
PHILLIPS: I don’t know how Phil got into the building business. I built, let’s see, the office downtown, then the building up at the north power plant, and that was built for security reasons where it is, and everything else, or we’d put it out in the world where everyone could see it.
SCANLON: Yes, I was kind of curious because the power plant is a handsome building and that modern office building kind of detracts from it.
PHILLIPS: Well, yes, it does. We were going to put it some other places. Then I had gone, put on the federal disaster committee out of Washington D.C., and I was given things about power plants and how they could be attacked and all these things. And we talked it all over and decided that that building should not be away from where we could take care of it. So we put it in there. The manager at that time hated where we put it. I didn’t like it because it is a pretty building. They’re both pretty buildings. But, it’s where it belongs. Because it can be taken care of rather quickly, and a lot of people don’t even notice it there. But it is stacked full of the control of this system.
SCANLON: The city utilities also moved into an old, well, it wasn’t old building, it was a finance building over at Cascade and Colorado. Was that under your tenure also?
PHILLIPS: Yes.
SCANLON: And that was just available space.
PHILLIPS: It was a space. We were in the bank buildings, up on the corner of Bijou and Tejon, above. In fact, I tried to buy the bank up there when the Colorado Springs National (Bank) closed.
SCANLON: Right, that’s the old Hagerman Block.
PHILLIPS: Yes. We were in, the electric division was in the upper floors over the shoe store that was in there. And I tried to buy that other building and they wouldn’t sell it to me. Or, they sold it to somebody else. And about six months later, it came back on the market again. And the guy had lost his loan on it. And so the federal government moved in on it. And I went in to buy it and the feds would not sell it to me. They sold it to a guy in California for over two hundred thousand dollars less than I was willing to pay for it.
SCANLON: That was the RTC, Redevelopment Trust Corporation (Resolution Trust Corporation) picking up properties for the savings and loans.
PHILLIPS: Where I am living right now, I sold these people a piece of property to the Shepards when I was utilities director, and this was part of the water treatment plant up here. This little chunk out here. And I needed a million dollars to buy that school out east. It was a grade school, and we needed more room for the water department. I could not build a building. They would not let me build a building anyplace. So I sold this little chunk for a million bucks and bought that school.
SCANLON: So the Shepherds, that would have been Bruce and Bud Shepherd?
PHILLIPS: It was Bud that bought it, or we sold it to. I never thought I would live here, but didn’t know what he was going to do with it. And he didn’t do anything with it. Because the guy that bought it from him, he undergrounded the electric, and the guy that bought it from him went bankrupt. And the feds sat on it for fourteen years.
SCANLON: Well, this pretty much brings us to the current except for perhaps your departure from the City. When you left the City, it was a time of your choosing?
PHILLIPS: Yes. Yes. I. It was changing. And it was changing in a way that I was not too excited about, because the city Council was making more and more moves to operate the utilities and take it out from underneath of the hands of the city manager. And that’s why, I think, they had the city managers they had. They hired weaker individuals that would not give them any trouble, and they have never changed. But they were just beginning to show this glimmer when they brought the last one aboard. Very strongly.
SCANLON: That would have been Mr. (James) Mullen, had replaced Zickefoose. And then Lorne Kramer replaced Mr. Mullen. But you had served thirty-two years with the city and your departure was filled with lots of tributes and admiration, so I thank you for your service to the community.
PHILLIPS: It was a marvelous way to grow up. And to serve in your work. I looked forward to every day. Most of them, let’s put it that way. There were a couple or three days in there when I was visiting with juries and that kind of thing that were not. It truly was a marvelous way for me to work, because they gave me gave me room to try to do things that were somewhat new, but followed a path, so we got, we worked out where we belonged and what we belonged with When we built the Nixon Power plant, I had a city council until that was just, they were ready to go down on their knees and shoot me. Because they figured it was a total waste of money. Well, if we hadn’t built that there, there wouldn’t be any city here today. And I don’t know about the one that’s, the gas one that is down there. Because we made a rule, Ray and I sat down, just before he left, we’d just gone, it was the day before he left, and said “There will never be a power plant built in this city again that can’t be used both coal and gas.” And I agreed to that. Because we’d seen what had happened. And make sure you put it some place where that you are not going to have to fight. The people are about to (indecipherable) the emissions off, and all that crap. But it was just a great experience. And as I said over and over again, I had great people to work with. Fine top managers. Sid Nichols, Ray Nixon. Just the tops of the engineering groups and thinkers and this kind of thing. And they didn’t let you get away with much. You either found the right direction or your direction was changed.
SCANLON: Thank you very much.
PHILLIPS: Well, thank you. And if I can help with the dates, I’m sorry, I can’t remember all these dates. I have a hard time remembering a lot of them now a days, so.
SCANLON: Dates can be reconstructed. Thank you very much.